Worcester County

Jewish Healthcare Center

Medicare rating
4 out of 5
1
finding of actual harm to a resident

Medicare’s overall rating for this home. The inspection part of it is graded on a curve against other Massachusetts homes, so a star here does not mean what it means in another state.

629 Salisbury Street, Worcester, MA 01609 · (508) 798-8653
141 beds · about 132 residents on a typical day · nonprofit corporation

Staffing

This home filed a staffing figure Medicare has flagged, and it is far too low to be right: under an hour of nursing care per resident per day, against a national average of about four. We are not going to estimate it. Federal rules still require a licensed nurse on duty around the clock and a registered nurse for eight hours a day, and nothing here says whether this home met them. Ask the home for its daily staffing sheet, which it must post where you can see it.

Where the benchmark comes from

Staffing is the measure most closely linked to how residents do, and the one families almost never see. How much nursing care a resident needs depends on how sick they are, so we compare this home against the level its own residents are expected to need. The marker on the first two bars shows that level. It is a research benchmark, not a legal limit. The hours shown are the hours the home filed with Medicare, before any adjustment for how sick its residents are.

What inspectors found

Inspectors visit every nursing home and write up what they find. This home has 17 findings on record going back to 2023, 2 of them after someone filed a complaint. Of the 17, 9 are from the last three years.

The 1 serious finding here

Actual harm July 21, 2023

Pain

A resident’s pain was not properly treated.

The home fixed this on August 18, 2023.

Medicare’s wording

Federal tag F697Provide safe, appropriate pain management for a resident who requires such services.

Everything on record

Immediate jeopardy 0 Has caused, or was likely to cause, serious injury, harm, impairment or death
Actual harm 1 A resident was hurt
Potential for harm 16 Could have caused harm. No one was hurt. The most common kind.

157 of the 341 nursing homes in Massachusetts have fewer findings of harm or immediate jeopardy on record than this one.

What these levels mean

Immediate jeopardy The most serious finding there is. Medicare’s words: noncompliance that has caused, or is likely to cause, serious injury, harm, impairment, or death. About 2 in every 100 findings nationally.

Actual harm A resident was really hurt, not just put at risk. About 3 in every 100 findings.

The letter is Medicare’s own code for how many residents were involved. Immediate jeopardy covers J, K and L. Actual harm covers G, H and I. The later the letter, the more residents were affected.

The plain-English line under each finding describes the rule the inspector cited. It is not an account of what happened. Medicare’s own wording of the rule is printed with it, and the full inspection report is the record of the incident.

What you can do

Numbers only go so far. These are two things most families do not know they can do.

Ask for today’s staffing sheet

Every nursing home must post how many nurses are working each shift, keep 18 months of it, and show it to you on request. Ask for today’s, then last Saturday’s. Weekends are when staffing thins out.

Call the ombudsman before you decide

Every state has a free, confidential long-term care ombudsman. You can ask how many complaints a specific home has had and what they were about. You can find your state’s office through its department of aging.

Where this comes from

Inspection findings, staffing hours, fines and star ratings on this page are published by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a federal agency, and are current as of August 1, 2026. We reload after each monthly release, and the footer of every page shows both the release date and the date we loaded it. The federal ID for this home is 225173.

What these numbers do not say

The level of care residents here are expected to need, and the gap, are not Medicare figures. We work them out from this home’s own Medicare case-mix score using the published CASE formula (Harrington and others, Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 2025). It is a research benchmark, not a legal limit.

Inspection findings are recorded by state inspectors on behalf of Medicare. Staffing hours come from payroll records the home files with Medicare, and Medicare audits a sample of them. Star ratings partly reflect quality measures the home reports about itself, which is why we show inspections and staffing separately rather than only the star.