CHI St. Alexius Health Garrison

On top of being a top notch nursing home overall, this place also performed well in inspections, where it earned an A. Not many nursing homes performed better in this area. Inspection scores are tied to datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this area have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also performed well in the category of long-term care, where we awarded it a grade of A-. Few nursing homes fared better in this category. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. One of the criteria we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccinations. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its residents. This is a proven method to avoid unnecessary deaths for the senior population. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Turning the page to our next area, this nursing home received a strong short-term care score. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- in this area. In computing our short-term care scores, we assess a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This grade is typically a fair assessment of the nursing home's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last item we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

In the last category we rated, this facility was given an impressive grade grade of B+ in our nursing category. With this score, the facility completed a very impressive profile. Our nursing grade is primarily tied to the facility's nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these areas as predictive indicators of the quality of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.