Jacob Health Care Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Arguably the most important factor we consider in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with better grades in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This facility received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to resident health or safety. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

We also gave this nursing home a score of A for our short-term care grade. In computing our short-term care scores, we assess a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This score is typically a meaningful assessment of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents that returned home from this facility. We found that 5.7 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This facility is also strong in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of B+. It outperformed most nursing homes in this category. We looked at the skill-level of nurses at the facility, in addition to the number of hours those nurses worked with patients, in determining our grade in this area. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by having a policy of turning a patient even once per day.

The final category we rated is long-term care. In this area, we gave this nursing home a decent grade of C. This proved to be this facility's worst area. Our long-term care scores are important for patients seeking non-healthcare services such as personal care. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. This facility keeps its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.