Christus St Joseph Home

We want to point out that this facility outperformed its overall grade in the category of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that area with a grade of A+. These inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. This is really what you like to see on an inspection report.

We also awarded this facility a positive grade in long-term care. This nursing home earned a B+ in this category, which is one of our more favorable scores. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it typically means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents healthy. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

We also gave this nursing home a decent score in the category of nursing care, with a grade of C. We looked at the levels of nurses employed by the nursing home, as well as the quantity of hours those nurses spent with patients, in computing our rating in this area. This place provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this place performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is generally a reliable indicator that a nursing home has sufficient quality controls in place.

The final category we graded is short-term care. We awarded it a grade of C in that category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. Short-term care grades are typically employed to gauge a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To provide highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. Unfortunately, it does not appear that this nursing home submitted information on registered nurse or physical therapist staffing. The final datapoint we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.