Bear Mountain at Andover

In addition to earning a quality overall score, this nursing home also earned excellent government inspections recently. We awarded it one of our highest scores in that category, with an A. Inspection grades are based on pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this category have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Compounding its high-end accomplishments in other areas, we gave this facility a score of A for its long-term care score. If you are seeking anything other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care scores. After considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 84.31372 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which happens to be slightly less than we were hoping for but still a respectable percentage. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A- in our nursing category. In calculating our nursing ratings, we analyze both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 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 nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Moving on to our fourth area, this facility also excelled in the short-term care category. In fact, we gave it a grade of B+ for that category. This completed a very impressive profile. Our short-term care ratings are crucial for prospective residents needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. This includes a broad range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final statistic we assessed in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that 5.3 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.