Ave Maria Village

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home excelled in our shot-term care category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to gauge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To offer highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.4 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

This nursing home has earned near flawless health inspections in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A- in this area. Our inspection ratings weigh a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher grades in this category usually have few of these severe deficiencies. This nursing home was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies an immediate threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also excelled in the category of long-term care, where it received a grade of A-. Only a select group of nursing homes received a better grade in this category. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

In our last area, this nursing home also was awarded an excellent nursing rating, with a grade of A-. This topped off a very strong report card. Our nursing score is largely associated with the nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these statistics as good measures of the caliber of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.