Diversicare of St Joseph

This facility earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its nearly flawless government inspection reports in recent years. We awarded them an A in this category. Arguably the most significant factor we look at in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This facility was assessed 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of these deficiencies to cause an immediate threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

Additionally, we also wanted to note that this facility was given favorable long-term care marks in this assessment. We awarded them one of our more impressive scores in this category, with a B. This turned out to be the facility's second best grade. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care tend to provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 97.1875 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is better than the average nursing home. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

One of this facility's better category grades was in the area of nursing care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of C. Our nursing grade weighs many subcategories, many of which are based on nursing hours. This place provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a relatively low total compared with most other facilities. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place actually fared better in some of the quality measures we looked at. It performed well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the number of hours of care provided.

The final category we looked at is short-term care, which proved to be a low point for this facility. We gave this facility a D for the area of short-term care. Our short-term care scores are likely more critical for patients needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation typically mandates higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not just nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The final item we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who eventually returned home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 5 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, this was well below the national average.