Christus St Joseph Home

One of the reasons this is a decent nursing home is that it received a very favorable inspection grade. In that category, we awarded this facility a grade of B+. Our inspection grades are based on several datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this area have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. 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 an excellent sign for this nursing home.

We also gave this facility a favorable score in long-term care. This nursing home earned a grade of B in this area, which happens to be one of our higher scores. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 99.50495 percent of its residents, which is better than most nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The third area we graded is short-term care, where this facility was awarded a grade of C in this category. With our short-term care assessment, we seek to create a fair gauge for rehabilitation. In doing so, we assess the nursing home's level of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. We were surprised to find that this nursing home was below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. It offered fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. It is important to determine whether this also correlates to a lower quality of care. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return home from this facility. We found that 5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well below the national average.

Moving on to the final category, we gave this nursing home a grade of D for the area of nursing. This is the facility's worst category score. Nursing scores are largely based on the facility's nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing scores. This place performed well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these statistics to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.