Joe-Anne Burgin Nursing Home

In addition to being a strong facility overall, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A. Not many nursing homes performed better in this area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being relatively minor. This nursing home received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This means that the government inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies an imminent threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Another one of this facility's above average category grades came in the area of long-term care. We gave them one of our better grades in that category, with a grade of B. For prospective patients seeking a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 91.30435 percent of its patients. This is slightly below what we were hoping for but still a respectable figure. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The next area we looked at was short-term care. In that area, we awarded this facility a solid grade of B-. Our short-term care grade is often used to score a facility's rehabilitation services In order to provide highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to offer better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. Unfortunately, it does not look like this facility submitted registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. The last measure we considered in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that just 5.1 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is below average.

The final area we looked at is nursing. This facility received a grade of C in this area. Our nursing grade is based on a host of factors. The most heavily weighted variable is the amount of time nurses spend with patients. This place averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident daily, which is not an impressive total. Lastly, our nursing scores also consider some quality-focused measures. We like to look at the percentage of residents who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. Sometimes these metrics are decent indicators of the quality of nursing care, since better care tends to reduce these problems.