Fake flowers decorate the front of the Cambridge Rehabilitation & Nursing Center on Feb. 14. (Photo: Marc Levy)

A resident at Cambridge Rehabilitation & Nursing Center took the unusual step of calling police April 30 after being allegedly handled roughly by an aide who was helping her take a shower and impatient that she didn’t move quickly enough, according to a police report. The unnamed resident was not obviously injured and police closed the incident after the nursing home promised that the employee wouldn’t be assigned to care for the resident in the future.

Nursing home administrator Emmanuel Ikoni said through a receptionist that he could not comment because “it’s a legal matter and he is talking to police,” the receptionist said Monday, eight days after the incident and after a police spokesperson indicated that all parties, including the resident, were satisfied with the resolution.

The police report labeled the incident as a report of an assault. It said the resident was having intestinal problems on April 30 and called for help from an aide to take a shower. “While being showered she was told to stand up by the CNA who was yelling at her. When it was time to sit the CNA yelled ‘Down’. She thinks she did not move fast enough because she was struck in the left arm by the CNA with an open hand then she was pushed down into the shower chair,” the report said, using a term for a certified nursing assistant.

The resident told police she did not want to press charges but did want assurance that the aide would no longer take care of her, according to the report. A detective followed up by contacting the “facility manager” and the involved certified nursing assistant, police department spokesperson Jeremy Warnick said. The manager “assigned a different CNA to the patient/victim, who was satisfied with the outcome,” Warnick said in an email.

The state Department of Public Health, which oversees nursing homes, is usually the first and only agency to get complaints or reports of alleged abuse. Nursing homes must report any abuse complaint to the state within two hours after finding out about it. Family members or residents themselves sometimes have complained to police, not the state, but the nursing home still must report the allegation when it learns of the incident, often when police arrive to investigate, according to a department official.

The department said the nursing home reported an incident on April 30. Cambridge Day has requested a copy of the report under the state public records law.

Cambridge Rehabilitation & Nursing Center, on 8 Dana St., Mid-Cambridge,, is the smallest of Cambridge’s three nursing homes, with 83 beds. It is also the only for-profit facility and is owned by a partnership based in Tarrytown, New York that also owns two other nursing homes in Medford and Everett and four facilities in New York.

A state inspection in April 2022 found violations in its physical plant such as a blanket stuffed into a wall opening exposing the outdoors. There were also violations in care, such as a resident with open leg sores and bruises that weren’t being treated as a doctor had ordered. All have been corrected, according to the state health department.

Cambridge Rehabilitation & Nursing Center scored three stars out of five on Medicare’s nursing home comparison site. Its score over the past three years on the state’s rating site was 115 out of 132, putting it in the bottom 20 percent of Massachusetts nursing homes.