Pilgrim Place Health Services Center

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home received an A+ in the area of long-term care. When facilities receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. Once we finished looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 98.79518 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia can be a life threatening illness for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. Nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we gave this nursing home a grade of A. In computing our nursing ratings, we analyze both nursing hours and the levels of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this facility 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 frequently be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a system of turning patients more frequently.

The third category we assessed is short-term care. Adding to its elite resume, this nursing home also performed well in this category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of of A for that area. In the category of short-term care, we seek to assess indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and various therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last statistic we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients that returned home from the facility. We found that 6.9 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Completing its excellent profile, this facility also performed well in our inspection category, which is based on the nursing home's recent government inspection reports. We awarded it a B+ for that category, which is one of our higher scores. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the government inspectors did not 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.