Saint Clare's Dover Hospital

One of the reasons this ended up being a strong nursing home is that it earned a very impressive inspection grade. In fact, inspections is its best category grade. In that category, we awarded it an A+. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively minor. Unfortunately, we weren't able to find deficiency data for this facility. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Additionally, this nursing home also was given favorable long-term care scores this year. In fact, we awarded it one of our higher grades in that area, with a score of B+. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 88.297874 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is a bit lower than we were hoping for but still a respectable percentage. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facilities next best category is short-term care. We awarded it a C in this category. This is basically a middle of the pack grade in this category. In computing our short-term care ratings, we size up the facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This category is often a useful assessment of a facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we considered in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is below average.

The final category we analyzed is nursing, is this nursing home's worst area. We awarded this facility a grade of D in this area. This really was one of the few weak links in a quality profile. Nursing scores are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This facility provided a meager 0.6 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is an alarmingly low total. While this facility didn't excel in nursing hours, it surprised us in some of the quality-based metrics in the nursing category, such as avoiding serious falls. This facility was above average in this metric, which is one redeeming quality we found in this area.