First Shamrock Care Center

Although this nursing home's overall score was terrible, it performed pretty well in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a B for that area, which is one of our better scores. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these end up being quite insignificant. This nursing home was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

This nursing home also didn't perform poorly in the category of long-term care. Indeed, we gave it a grade of C in that category, which wound up being among its more favorable scores. Our long-term care grade is generally used to judge a nursing home's performance as a traditional convalescent home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services provided by a rehabilitation facility. One of the criteria we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccinations. Candidly, we were a bit worried that this facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to a relatively low 72.90323 percent of its patients. Nevertheless, this facility excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Unfortunately, this nursing home's next best category is short-term care. However, with a D in this category, it still fared somewhat badly. Our short-term care grades are considered to be most meaningful for residents requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. This means not just nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. As you might expect, we learned that this place offers significantly less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than the typical nursing home. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely was not a strength for this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, about half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.

The next area we scored is nursing, where this facility received a very poor score in this area as well. Sadly, it received an abysmal F in this area, which is definitely very concerning. There are numerous criteria within this grade. Many of the subcategories are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. On top of ranking below average in nursing hours per resident, this facility also had poor marks in the quality-based metrics we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This place was at about 1.5 times the national average in both of these statistics. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These metrics pulled down this nursing home's nursing grade quite a bit.