Aperion Care Marseilles

Even though we graded this nursing home extremely poorly overall, it received a somewhat respectable nursing grade this year. We gave it a C in that category. There are a host of datapoints within this grade. Most of these datapoints relate to the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place surprisingly excelled in some of the quality measures we looked at. It scored well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.

This facility also didn't rate terribly in the category of short-term care. In fact, we awarded it a grade of C in that area, which happens to be another one of its more favorable scores. In crafting these short-term care grades, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The purpose is to create a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its patients based on the measures we assessed. The important question is whether this also affected quality of care. The final metric we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.

Unfortunately, with a grade of D in the inspection category, this facility performed relatively poorly in that area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection scores. One critical factor is health deficiencies. We recommend you scrutinize the level of severity of those deficiencies. This particular facility had 5 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only positive thing we found is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that suggest that they posed a risk to patient health or safety. Lastly, we also want to point out that this nursing home was assessed large government fines totaling more than $100,000. This often indicates that a facility's poor performance has been an issue for more than one year.

The last category we graded is long-term care. This facility received a rock bottom grade of F in that area. For prospective patients in need of a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are very important. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Fortunately, this nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is a very respectable percentage. Surprisingly, this nursing home also keeps its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.