Ascension Living - Lakeshore at Siena

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ short-term care grade. Short-term care ratings are based on the nursing home's quantity of skilled nursing services. This means a vast range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.8 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

This facility has also received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple minor deficiencies aren't necessarily something to panic about.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. In calculating our nursing grades, we factor in both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving a patient at least once a day.

The last area we analyzed was long-term care. This facility was given a better than average nursing grade this year, with a B. Although this wasn't quite as strong as a few of its other grades, this is nevertheless one of our more impressive scores in that category. When facilities receive this type of grade in this category it is usually a good sign for resident care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses aids. After looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is significantly higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.