Ave Maria Home

On top of performing well overall, this nursing home also received a nearly flawless inspection report. Therefore, it earned one of our best grades in that area with an A+. These inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This nursing home was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies an imminent risk to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its dominant assessments in other areas, we awarded this facility a grade of A for our long-term care rating. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in this category it is typically a good sign for patient care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents, which is much higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Turning to another strength for this facility, we awarded them one of our more favorable scores in our short-term care category as well, with a grade of B+. Short-term care scores are based on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This includes a vast range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, in addition to other types of therapy. Unfortunately, we weren't able to track down information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. The final datapoint we looked at in this category is the number of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that 5.8 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

The last area we analyzed was nursing. We awarded this nursing home a decent grade in that category, with a B-. Even though this isn't as strong as some of this nursing home's other grades, it is nevertheless not a terrible score. There are many factors within this grade. Most of the data points relate to the quantity of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides only 0.6 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a somewhat discouraging figure as it is well below the national average. Lastly, nursing ratings also factor in quality-based measures, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this place actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is typically an indicator that a facility has sufficient quality controls in place. Many falls could be avoided if a facility supplies enough nurses aids to assist its residents.