Eunice C Smith Nursing Home

Eunice C Smith Nursing Home is one of just three nursing homes in Alton, Illinois. This nursing home received an overall grade of C, which is a good rating. Based on our analysis, this nursing home has some redeeming qualities. One of the major highlights of this facility's profile is its exemplary inspection grade, which you can find in the next section.

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this place also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a grade of A. Few facilities performed better in this area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are quite minor. This facility was hit with 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered severe. This means that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies an immediate threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

This facility also performed well in the category of short-term care, with a strong score of A- in this area. Our short-term care ratings are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a vast range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. One reason for this facility's strong score in this category is that it provides a greater volume of physical therapist hours to its residents than the average nursing home. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return home from this nursing home. On top of excelling in the area of physical therapy hours, we found that it fared as well as just about any nursing home in the country with 67.5 percent of its patients returning home.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of C in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. Nursing grades are based largely on quantity of nursing care available. Based on the CMS data, this nursing home offers 3.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grade also includes applicable quality-based metrics. While this place excelled in terms of quantity of nursing hours, it lagged a bit in some of the datapoints that focused on quality. This place's nursing grade was hurt by its subpar performance in the area of minimizing pressure ulcers. In fact, we found that 12.5 percent of this facility's residents sustained pressure ulcers. Since some pressure ulcers could be avoided with sufficient nursing protocols, we reduce a nursing home's nursing rating when we see this kind of frequency of pressure ulcers.

This nursing home's worst area was long-term care, which is the final category we assessed. It received a lowly F in this area. Despite multiple respectable scores in other areas, this score is still of a concern so we would like to to point it out. Facilities that don't fare well in this category often do not provide as much nursing care and also may be lagging in some of the areas of routine personal care we assessed. After assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination records. Frankly, we were a bit worried that this facility vaccinated 55.555553 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is significantly lower than what we expected. To our surprise, this place was actually decent at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.81 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.