Watertown Health Center

Even though we were not high on this nursing home overall, we awarded it a grade of A- for our nursing rating. This score is far better than its overall grade. The nursing grade analyzes many components, most of which are tied to nursing hours. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics 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 nursing home the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a system of moving a patient more often.

This nursing home received its next best category score in the area of long-term care. We gave this nursing home a grade of B- in this category, which is a decent grade. For residents seeking a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. After we finished looking at the volume of nursing care, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. Frankly, we were a bit bothered by the fact that this nursing home vaccinated just 37.179485 percent of its residents against pneumonia. On a more positive note, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home's second least favorable category is short-term care, where it earned just a D in that category. This is a well below average grade. Our short-term care grades are thought to be more important for residents requiring rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation typically requires more skilled nursing. This includes not just nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. With its score in this category, we were not surprised to discover that this place is well below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its patients based on the measures we assessed. Finally, we assessed the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 3.3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

Moving on our final category of inspections, this facility received an F in this area. Since this data is compiled by government inspectors, we heavily weight negative feedback in this area. When a facility has this bad of an inspection rating, you should expect some severe deficiencies on its inspection report. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to the well being of residents. This nursing home was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only positive thing we found is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that indicate that they posed a threat to resident health or safety. Lastly, we also need to point out that this facility received large government fines amounting to more than $100,000. This generally suggests that a bad performance has been an issue for multiple years.