Jefferson House

In addition to faring well in its overall grade, this nursing home received high marks in our short-term care category as well. It received our highest score in that category with a score of A+. In the area of short-term care, we seek to qualify measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last datapoint we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that 6.7 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

Adding to this nursing home's impressive resume, we gave this facility a grade of A for inspections. Our inspection grades are tied to datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspections. Facilities that score well in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. It does not look like we were able to find deficiency counts for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The next area we analyzed is long-term care. Contributing to its superb resume, this facility also performed well in this area. In fact, it received a grade of of A- in that area. Facilities that receive this kind of score in this category tend to provide consistent around the clock care to ensure residents are kept in good health. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

In our final category, we gave this facility a grade of A for our nursing grade. This topped off a very strong report card. The nursing score weighs a number of factors. The most heavily weighted variable is the amount of time nurses spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these metrics as reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.