Diversicare of St Theresa

The main reason this facility received a decent overall grade is its excellent government inspections in recent years. We gave it one of our better scores in that area, with an A-. This is a much better grade than the place's overall score, which was decent but certainly not elite. Our inspection grades are based on many items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this category have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This place was assessed 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to cause an immediate threat to patient safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B. In calculating our nursing grades, we weigh both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the skill levels of the nurses. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving patients more frequently.

This facility received its next most favorable category score in the category of long-term care. We gave this facility a B- in this category, which is an acceptable score. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We were a bit concerned this facility provided the vaccine to just 88.99083 percent of its patients. On a more positive note, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The final area we analyzed is short-term care. For this category, we awarded this facility a C. In the category of short-term care, we seek to qualify measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We analyze a nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final statistic we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that just 4.3 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is actually below average.