Holy Cross Health Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Inspection scores are based on several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this category typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. It doesn't appear that we were able to find information about this nursing home's deficiencies. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This high end facility also excelled in the area of long-term care, where we gave it a score of A+. Very few facilities performed better in this category. When nursing homes receive this kind of grade in long-term care it is usually a good sign for patient care and indicates that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is much higher than most nursing homes. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category. In computing our nursing scores, we factor in both nursing hours and the skill levels of those nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The fourth area we graded is short-term care, where this facility was awarded a grade of B+. This rounded out a very impressive profile. Few facilities received a B+ or better in all four categories. In our short-term care assessment, we attempt to create a sound measure for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we analyze a facility's levels of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.