Divine Providence Community Home

One of the reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is it received an impressive inspection grade. In fact, inspections turned out to be its best category. In that area, we awarded this facility an A. Arguably the most significant factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Contributing to its elite profile, this facility also performed well in our long-term care category. In fact, we gave it a grade of A for the category. When facilities receive this kind of score in this category it is usually a good sign for resident care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents healthy. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The next area we analyzed was short-term care. This facility received a favorable short-term care score, with a grade of B+ in this category. In the area of short-term care, we attempt to qualify indicators of a facility's rehabilitation services. We analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and various therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

In the last category we looked at, this nursing home was given a very favorable grade of B+ in our nursing category. With this grade, the facility rounded out a very strong profile. Our nursing grade is based on many data points, most of which are tied to nursing hours. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these areas as reliable indicators of the caliber of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.