West Newton Healthcare

In addition to receiving a great overall score, this facility really excelled in the area of nursing, where it received an A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Our nursing grade is primarily tied to a nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This facility also received a favorable long-term care score. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B+ in this area, which happens to be one of our better. For prospective residents in need of a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. One of the statistics we considered after nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 62.289562 percent of its patients. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In addition, we also wanted to point out that this nursing home was given strong short-term care marks this year. We awarded them one of our better scores in this area, with a grade of B+. In crafting these short-term care grades, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our purpose is to formulate a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

The final category we looked at was inspections. This did not end up being one of this nursing home's stronger categories. We gave it a D in this area. Since this data is collected by government inspectors, we take it very seriously. One of the most important factors in evaluating inspection reports is deficiencies. We would pay close attention to the severity of those deficiencies. This particular facility was hit with 5 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only positive thing we can say is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that suggest that they posed a risk to patient health or safety. Lastly, we also would like to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received large government fines in recent years of over $50,000. This usually suggests that government inspectors became frustrated after several years of bad government inspections.