Jefferson Healthcare Center

The main reason this nursing home received a decent overall score is its impeccable health inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our higher scores in that area, with an A+. This is a notably better grade than the facility's overall score, which was decent but certainly not elite. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection scores. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these end up being relatively minor. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. This is definitely a good sign for this nursing home.

This nursing home also was awarded a favorable grade in our long-term care category. We gave this nursing home an above average grade of B in that category. For prospective patients looking for a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. After assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 85.73825 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which happens to be slightly less than we anticipated but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we had hoped, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Turning to another strength for this facility, it also received an elite nursing grade. We gave this facility a score of D. The nursing score consists of a handful of factors, however, the main one is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. This facility performed well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Moving on to the final area, this nursing home really didn't perform very well. Due to a rock bottom grade of F in short-term care, this is this facility's weakest grade. In calculating our short-term care scores, we look at a facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This grade is often a fair assessment of the facility's rehabilitation. Based on its weak rating in this area, we weren't shocked to find that this nursing home provided far fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most other facilities. The last statistic we considered in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics was damning for this facility's short-term care grade.