Wachusett Manor

Wachusett Manor is an average-sized facility located in Gardner, Massachusetts. We awarded this nursing home an overall grade of B+. A grade of this caliber requires strong marks in most areas. Based on all of the relevant data, you can do much worse than this place. This nursing home is better in some categories than others, but it did not have any bad scores in any of our four major categories. More information about these categories can be found below.

On top of earning a strong overall grade, this facility performed well in our nursing category. In fact, we gave it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Our nursing score is based on a host of subcategories. The most important variable is the quantity of hours nurses spend with residents. This particular nursing home provided 3.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility 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 frequently be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This facility also excelled in the area of inspections. We awarded it an A for that category. Our inspection grades are tied to items located in the a nursing home's inspections. Nursing homes that score well in this area typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' scale. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

This facility is also above average in the area of short-term care, where it received a score of B+. It performed more favorably than most nursing homes in this area. In the area of short-term care, we try to assess indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We look at a facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. This nursing home employs both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities employ these skilled professionals. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from this facility. This place fared better than most facilities with 54 percent of its residents returning home.

The final category we graded is long-term care, where this facility was awarded a B-. This actually turned out to be this nursing home's weakest area. This is still not a poor grade. Our long-term care ratings are critical for individuals requiring personal care. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Fortunately, this facility gave the vaccine to 98.17518 percent of its residents, which is a very solid datapoint. This facility was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.53 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.