Daughters of Sarah Nursing Center

To go along with its decent overall grade, we awarded this nursing home an A for its inspection grade. This score is far better than the facility's overall rating. These inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This nursing home was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This means that CMS did not consider any of these deficiencies to create an immediate threat to patient health or safety. A few relatively minor dings are not necessarily something to panic about.

This facility also was awarded a strong grade in our long-term care category. We gave this nursing home a better than average grade of B in this category. For residents in need of a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. One of the statistics we considered after nurse's aid hours was vaccines. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 83.85503 percent of its residents. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we like to see, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The third most favorable category we awarded this facility in any category came in the area of short-term care, where we gave it a grade of C. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to judge a nursing home's rehabilitation services To have highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide better levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 4.5 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

Switching gears to the final category, we awarded this nursing home a D in the area of nursing. This is the facility's weakest category score. Unfortunately, this score pulled down the nursing home's overall grade to a certain degree. Nursing ratings are heavily correlated with quantity of nursing care available. This facility averaged only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing scores. This place fared well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.