October 1, 2026. Recently, Paul Lanzikos worked with Beverly Beat reporter Paul Leighton who wrote an article describing the very bad conditions at Blueberry Hill in Beverly.
The article (also reprinted below) is What’s the lowest-rated nursing home in Massachusetts? Hint: It’s located in our city.
To further inform us, Paul Lanzikos ran some statewide numbers. He downloaded all the current survey results posted by the Department of Public Health for all 350 nursing homes operating in the state. and compiled them in the attached spreadsheet. You may be interested in seeing the results for nursing homes in your area. You can sort the data by any column. The excel file is Statewide Nursing Home Survey 2026.xlsx.
What’s the lowest-rated nursing home in Massachusetts? Hint: It’s located in our city
The Beverly Beat, October 1, 2026 by Paul Leighton
Unfortunately, it’s not unusual to see stories about the terrible conditions and care inside some nursing homes. The Boston Globe ran a Spotlight investigation about the subject this week, and I’ve written my share of stories about poorly rated local nursing homes.
This is another one of those stories. I was checking the rankings of our nursing homes here in Beverly recently and came across this startling fact — of the 350 nursing homes in Massachusetts, your hometown has the one that’s tied for the worst.
According to the state’s rating system, Blueberry Hill Rehabilitation & Healthcare Center on Brimbal Avenue ranks last when it comes to its overall score, along with West Newton Healthcare. The state doesn’t say that explicitly. There is no ranking of 1 through 350. But its Nursing Home Survey Tool says Blueberry Hill’s total score is 80, and then notes somewhat cryptically that “0% of all facilities had a score of 80 or lower.”
It’s a bit like describing a last-place team as a team with no other team behind them, but it sure sounds to me like 80 is the lowest score in the state. Luckily for me, one of the state’s foremost experts on elder care lives right here in Beverly, so I turned to him for help. Paul Lanzikos was the cabinet secretary of the Massachusetts Executive Office of Elder Affairs under former Gov. Michael Dukakis and served for 15 years as executive director of North Shore Elder Services. He’s a co-founder of Dignity Alliance Massachusetts, a coalition of disability and senior advocacy organizations that formed in 2020 in response to nursing home deaths.
When I reached out to Lanzikos about Blueberry Hill’s ranking he was kind enough to spend a considerable amount of time going through the data to confirm that Blueberry Hill is one of only two nursing homes in the state to have the lowest score of 80. The scores are compiled by the state based on five categories. The maximum score is 132 points; the statewide average score is 114. Lanzikos determined that Blueberry Hill also has the lowest score in the nursing category and is tied for the second lowest in administration. “Those are particularly disconcerting to me,” he said.
The rock-bottom score is new, but unfortunately the problems at Blueberry Hill are not. The facility was cited for abuse in both 2023 and 2024, the second time following the death of two residents. Among the many problems cited was a shortage of nursing staff. Even some of the nurses who were on duty lacked the “skills necessary for the care and treatment of residents,” the 2024 report said. The 132-bed facility has one star, the lowest ranking, on the Medicare nursing home compare website. Blueberry Hill was fined a total of $231,459 by the federal government from 2023 to 2025 for serious infractions.
I asked Lanzikos what people should make of the fact that Blueberry Hill has such poor marks.
“I would be very concerned about considering that for anybody I care about,” he said.
And what about for residents living there now?
“If they have any concerns at all for any aspect of their care or comfort or well being, they should report it to the (Blueberry Hill) administration, but also report it to the ombudsman assigned to the facility and to both the Department of Public Health and the attorney general,” he said.
I asked Blueberry Hill if they wanted to comment for this story and they sent me this statement attributed to the facility’s administrator, Jeff Crowley:
“The Massachusetts DPH Survey Performance Tool reflects three years of survey history and does not capture Blueberry Hill’s recent progress. Over the past year, the center has made significant improvements, including a 78% reduction in survey deficiencies from 2024 to 2025, with just seven deficiencies in 2025, below both the Massachusetts and national averages. Blueberry Hill has also stabilized its leadership team, eliminated reliance on agency nursing staff, and achieved resident outcome measures that outperform state averages in several key clinical areas. Because historical survey results remain part of the state’s calculation methodology, the scorecard does not fully reflect these recent gains. The center’s improving regulatory performance, strong quality outcomes, and commitment to consistent resident care demonstrate meaningful and sustained progress.”
One of the biggest problems with nursing homes, according to elder care advocates, is the fact that many are owned by out-of-state companies backed by private equity that have been accused of squeezing profits out of their facilities. One of the techniques some of the owners use is paying expenses to so-called “related parties,” which means essentially paying yourself.
Blueberry Hill, which is owned by New Jersey-based chain Marquis Health, generated $1.5 million in net income in 2024, according to financial records. But the company also paid nearly $1 million to “related parties” for things like consulting fees and financial services.
As a side note, Dignity Alliance Massachusetts is advocating to make all of this information more transparent for the public. Lanzikos told me he had to click on all 350 nursing homes on the state’s Nursing Home Survey Performance Tool in order to confirm that Blueberry Hill is tied for the lowest score. His research also showed that Lafayette Rehabilitation and Skilled Nursing in Marblehead has the best overall score (130 out of the 132 maximum) of the 19 nursing homes on the North Shore. Ledgewood and CareOne at Essex Park, the other two nursing homes in Beverly, have scores of 123 and 119 respectively, both above the state average of 114.
Lanzikos said a low nursing home rating doesn’t necessarily mean that everything is going wrong every day. “But it does mean there’s enough serious things to be concerned about. If you’re already in the facility you want to be on guard, be wary, speak up — that phrase ‘If you see something, say something.’ Even ones that score well, it’s very important for a family member or advocate to use their own eyes, ears, nose and judgment. Make visits, ideally several times, at different times of day and on different days, to ascertain, ‘Do things look right? Does it feel right? Does it smell right?’”
But when a nursing home has the lowest score in the state, Lanzikos said, “I would just stay away.”