Diversicare of St Joseph

Although we gave this facility a horrible overall grade, we awarded it a grade of A- for our inspections rating. This grade is far more impressive than the nursing home's overall score. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. It is typically best to avoid facilities that had too many deficiencies. While this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

This nursing home's next best score is long-term care, but it still received just a D in that category. This turns out to be a relatively poor score. For prospective residents in need of a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 98.84726 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is higher than the majority of nursing homes. To our surprise, this nursing home also fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

Unfortunately, this facility received an F for its short-term care grade. Short-term care grades are generally employed to judge a facility's rehabilitation services In order to have highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Not surprisingly, we learned that this place provides substantially less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the typical nursing home. The last item we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.8 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics doomed this nursing home's short-term care grade.

The last category we graded was nursing, in which this facility received a very poor grade in this area as well. We gave it a lowly F in this category, which is obviously very concerning. There are a number of criteria within this area. Many of the subcategories reflect levels of nurse staffing. With just 0.2 hours of nursing care per patient per day, this facility's nurse staffing levels were quite a bit below average. On top of rating below average in nursing hours per resident, this facility also had poor marks in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and major falls. This nursing home was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in both of these statistics. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These scores pulled down this nursing home's nursing grade significantly.