Jefferson Manor Health Center

The primary reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it earned an elite inspection grade. Its inspection score was far superior to its overall grade. In our inspections category, we gave it an A+. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this category typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This place was hit with 7 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to resident safety or health. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

Adding to this nursing home's list of strengths, it also earned an excellent nursing rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of C in this category. We weighed the skill-level of nurses employed by the facility, in addition to the number of hours those nurses were with residents, in computing our grade in this category. This place provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics. Although this nursing home got docked a bit for its nursing hours, it excelled in a few of these quality measures. With less than five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it fared well in this area. This can be an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of moving a resident even once per day.

This nursing home's next most favorable area turned out to be its long-term care grade, where it was awarded a C. Our long-term care scores are based in part on the facility's amount of nursing care. This includes a broad range of personal care services, ranging from assistance with activities of daily living to routine healthcare services. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 97.54386 percent of its patients, which is higher than the majority of nursing homes. This nursing home also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The last category we graded was short-term care, which turned out to be a low point for this nursing home. We awarded this facility a grade of D for the area of short-term care. In computing these short-term care scores, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The objective is to create a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of various facilities. With its grade in this category, we were not stunned to find that this place is well below average in terms of the quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the metrics we assessed. Frankly, this was what we expected to find. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who eventually returned home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.3 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.