Wingate at South Hadley

This nursing home received a nursing score which is stronger than its overall grade. We awarded this nursing home an above average grade of B+ in this area. Our nursing category assesses a handful of factors, most of which are based on levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Additionally, we awarded this facility a B in our short-term care category. This happens to be one of our higher grades. Short-term care ratings are based on the facility's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a vast range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last item we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that 4.7 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

This facilities third best category was long-term care. We gave it a grade of B- in this category. This is basically a middle of the road score in this category. Our long-term care grades are vital for patients needing non-healthcare services such as personal care. After looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination records. We were a bit alarmed this nursing home vaccinated 85.751976 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which happens to be significantly lower than the national average. Nevertheless, this place keeps its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The last category we assessed is inspections. This facility did not receive favorable inspections in recent years. In fact, we gave it an F in this category. This ended up pulling down this nursing home's overall grade significantly. When a facility has this bad of an inspection score, you should expect some severe deficiencies on its inspection report. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to the well being of residents. This particular nursing home was assessed 3 deficiencies by CMS. The only positive thing we found is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that indicate that they posed a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, we would like to point out that this nursing home received large government fines amounting to over $100,000. This usually indicates that a nursing home's poor performance spanned several years.