Bethany St Joseph Care Center

In addition to receiving an elite overall grade, this nursing home also received an A+ inspection score. This is based on its recent inspection reports. An A+ in this area is one of the best complements we can pay to a facility. Arguably the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Unfortunately, it does not look like we were able to find deficiency counts for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to point out the fact that this nursing home was awarded a dominant score of A in our long-term care area. Nursing homes that receive this kind of score in this category typically provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure residents are well cared for. After we finished looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses, we then looked at the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is too frequently a life threatening illness for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. When determining a nursing home's nursing grade, we look at the number of hours nurses are caring for patients and the skill levels of those nurses. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a system of turning patients more often.

Moving on to the last area, this facility received an extremely favorable short-term care score. While this wasn't quite as elite as some of its other scores, this remains one of our more impressive grades a facility can receive. Our short-term care scores are thought to be most important for those in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally mandates additional highly-skilled nursing services. This means not only nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents that who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. We found that 4.6 percent of this facility's residents returned home.