Sacred Heart Nursing Home

With an address in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Sacred Heart Nursing Home is one of seven available nursing homes in the city. This nursing home turns out to be a grade A facility, which is a dominant grade. Indeed, this proved to be one of the three highest graded nursing homes in the city. If you scroll down, you will see this facility's category ratings, which are also strong.

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this facility also received an A+ long-term care grade. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. After considering the volume of nursing care, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 38.450073 percent of its patients for pneumonia. This nursing home also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 1.48 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days.

Adding to this nursing home's impressive resume, we gave this facility a grade of A for our inspections rating. Inspection ratings are tied to pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspections. Nursing homes that score well in this area have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that category. In calculating a facility's nursing score, we weigh the quantity of hours nurses spend with residents and the level of skill of those nurses. This nursing home provides 3.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed better than average in this area. This is often a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can typically be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The final area we assessed is short-term care. This facility received a better than average nursing grade in our assessment, with a B. While this isn't quite as elite as several of its other scores, this is nevertheless one of our stronger scores for this category. Our short-term care scores are vital for prospective residents in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a vast range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. This nursing home employs both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities employ these skilled professionals. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 38 percent of this facility's residents returned home.