The North Shore Estates

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our short-term care rating. Short-term care ratings are critical for people seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires additional highly-skilled nursing. This means a vast scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final datapoint we assessed in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that 6.1 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

This facility has received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A- in this category. Inspection scores weigh several factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we consider is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better grades in this category typically have few of these severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This tells you the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

Adding to its profile, this facility also earned a grade of B+ for its nursing rating. This is a well above average score in this category. The nursing rating is based on many components, many of which are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next category we rated was long-term care, where this nursing home was awarded a B. Believe it or not, this ended up being this nursing home's worst area. A nursing home could be doing a lot worse when it's poorest score still is superior to most other facilities. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 95.675674 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is too frequently a deadly condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility doesn't leave this to chance. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.