Odd Fellows Home of Massachusetts

To pair with its favorable overall score, we gave this nursing home an A- for our inspections rating. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with better scores in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Contributing to this facility's list of strengths, it also was given a top-shelf long-term care grade. We gave them an elite strong of A- in this area. For prospective patients in need of a permanent place to live rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are a key measure. After assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 78.81356 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which happens to be a few points less than we expected but still a respectable percentage. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B+. There are many factors included in this area. Many of these criteria relate to nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics 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 facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a system of turning a resident more frequently.

The final area we analyzed was short-term care, which was this facility's worst category. We awarded this facility a grade of D in this category. Naturally, this score pulled down the facility's overall profile a bit. Our short-term care ratings are important for people seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing services. This includes a wide spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. It appears that this nursing home was subpar in multiple staffing areas we looked at. The facility supplied fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most nursing homes. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. This wasn't a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 3.1 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, around half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.