The Berkeley Retirement Home
150 Berkeley Street, Lawrence MA 01841 · (978) 682-1614 · 91.05% estimated occupancy 1Updated: Aug 1, 2020 · By Sara Levinsohn
With an address in Lawrence, Massachusetts, The Berkeley Retirement Home is one of only three nursing homes in this city. This is a very solid facility, with an overall grade of B. You can certainly do much worse than this facility. This facility's impressive report card was highlighted by its nursing grade, which you can find in the next section.
Additional Details:
Accepts Medicare 1 :
Accepts Medicaid 1 : 19 Beds
CCRC :
Non profit - Corporation
Resident Council:
Family Council:
Medical Staff Hours Per Patient (2019)
Nurse Quality
One of the reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. In that area, we gave this nursing home an A+. Nursing scores are based in large part on quality and quantity of nursing care. This nursing home offers extremely high levels of nursing care, averaging 4.4 hours per resident each day. This is more nursing care than nearly any other facility provides. Lastly, this place also excelled in the quality-based metrics we assessed. For example, it fared as well as any nursing home Massachusetts when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these statistics as good measures of the caliber of nursing care provided.
Facility Inspections
This nursing home also performed well in inspections, which is based on the facility's inspections. We awarded it an A+ for that category. These inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.
Long-term Care Quality
This nursing home's third most favorable area ended up being its long-term care grade, where it was awarded a B-. Our long-term care grade assesses a nursing home's assistance with daily living instead of the highly skilled nursing and medical services that are critical to a rehabilitation facility. This facility's vaccination data were a bit weaker than some of the other datapoints in this category, such as its number of nursing hours per resident. It gave the pneumonia vaccine to just 90.27778 percent of its patients. We would love to see some improvement herein this statistic next year. Nevertheless, this nursing home excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.91 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.
Short-term Care Quality
The last category we looked at was short-term care, was this nursing home's weakest area. We awarded this nursing home a grade of D in this area. This is one of the couple of dings of a quality report card. Our short-term care grades are crucial for patients needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires more highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a vast range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. In this facility's case, we found that it provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely was not a strength for this facility. We found that just 17.9 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, about half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.
Overall Rating Over Time
Compared to national and state averages across all facilities.
The Berkeley Retirement Home Quality Metrics
Minimizes Pressure Ulcers
This is a measure of the percent of long-term residents which developed pressure ulcers . We factor in this statistic in computing both nursing and long-term care grades.
Percent of Patients with Pressure Ulcers
Lower is Better
Minimizes Serious Falls
This is the percent of patients that sustained a fall which resulted in severe injury.
Percent of Patients with Serious Falls
Lower is Better
Minimizes Urinary Tract Infections
This indicates the percentage of patients that suffered from a urinary tract infection. UTI's are routinely caused by lower quality nursing care. Closer supervision can limit the number of UTI's sustained by residents in a nursing home. Note that this datapoint is affected by by the fact that facilities have varying reporting standards for UTI's.
Percent of Patients with UTIs
Lower is Better
Appropriately Uses Anti-Psychotic Medication
This indicates the percentage of patients who were given antipsychotic drugs. While antipsychotic drugs may be vital to many patients, it is important to ensure these medications are being used only where medically required. In limited cases, excessive reliance on these medications may mean that a nursing home is using these drugs to subdue residents.
Percent of Patients
Lower is Better
Appropriately Uses Anti-Anxiety Medication
This indicates the percentage of residents given antianxiety medications. These medications are commonly used to treat residents experiencing depression or anxiety.
Percent of Patients
Lower is Better
Managing Depression Among Residents
This tells you the percentage of patients demonstrating depressive symptoms.
Percent of Patients
Lower is Better
Appropriate Vaccine Usage
This is the percentage of patients that were given the flu and pneumonia vaccines. Higher vaccination rates should be demanded by residents.
Percent of Patients
Higher is Better
Residents Maintain Autonomy
This datapoint measures the percent of long-term care patients who required more assistance with activities of daily living over time. Activities of daily living include activities such as moving around and eating. Many argue that this is a reasonable measure of a resident's well-being.
Percentage of Patients
Lower is Better
Ability to Keep Residents Mobile
This is the percent of patients who retained mobility levels over time. Optimizing mobility is often a good sign for residents' well-being.
Percentage of Residents
Higher is Better
Hospitalizations
This tells you the number of times residents are hospitalized per 1,000 days of care. There is usually a correlation between avoiding hospitalizations and the quality of nursing home care.
Hospitalizations per 1,000 resident days
Lower is Better
Short-term Care: Rehospitalizations
This metric measures the number of times residents are rehospitalized per 1,000 days of short-term patient care.
Percentage of Residents Rehospitalized
Lower is Better