Newbridge on the Charles Skilled Nursing Facility

On top of being a great facility overall, it also received A+ government inspections in recent years. Its inspections are virtually perfect. Inspection ratings account for several factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better grades in this category tend to have very few of these severe deficiencies. Unfortunately, we weren't able to find deficiency counts for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This exemplary facility also performed remarkably in the area of short-term care, where it received a grade of A+. Very few nursing homes fared better in this area. In calculating our short-term care scores, we assess the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This category is typically a meaningful measure of the nursing home's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The third category we looked at was long-term care. Contributing to its impressive profile, this nursing home also performed well in this category. In fact, it received a grade of of A- for the category. For long-term care residents, the primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We were not able to find information on vaccination rates. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The final category we analyzed was nursing, where this nursing home was awarded a grade of A-. This wrapped up a very impressive report card. Very few nursing homes received an A- or better in every single category. Our nursing rating weighs quite a few subcategories, however, the paramount one is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a system of moving residents more frequently.