Cathedral Health Care Center

One of the reasons this ended up being a decent facility is it received a very favorable inspection score. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B+. Inspection scores are based on datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this category have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This nursing home was assessed 11 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to cause an immediate risk to resident health or safety. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

This nursing home's second highest category turned out to be short-term care. In that area, we gave this facility a B-. In computing these short-term care grades, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to formulate a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Unfortunately, this place was below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the measures we assessed. The real question is whether this adversely affected quality of care. The last item we assessed in this category is the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of C in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. Our nursing rating weighs a handful of subcategories, however, the primary one is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Lastly, our nursing scores also consider quality-based measures, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this nursing home performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is typically an indicator that a nursing home has sufficient quality controls in place. Many falls could be avoided if a nursing home provides enough nurses to assist its patients.

Our next category is long-term care, in which we gave this facility a grade of C in that area. In a long-term care environment, the primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. One of the criteria we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccines. Thankfully, this facility administered the pneumonia vaccination to 99.27536 percent of its residents. This facility was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.