Laverna Village of St Joseph

Although this facility's overall grade was not a highlight, it actually received a very good score in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B for that area, which is one of our better grades. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some can be relatively insignificant. While this place had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. A couple minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

One of this nursing home's better category scores was in the category of short-term care. This proved to be its second best category. In that area, we gave this nursing home a grade of B-. Our short-term care scores are thought to be most meaningful for people requiring a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not only nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other types of therapy. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Finally, we considered the number of residents that were able to return home from this facility. We found that 5.7 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit below average.

This nursing home's second least favorable category is long-term care, where it received a grade of just D in that area. This is a relatively poor grade. For prospective patients looking for a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care grades are an important measure. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Surprisingly, this facility also keeps its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

Turning to the final area, this facility didn't fare well in this area either. Due to a bottom of the barrel grade of F in nursing, this is really as terrible as it gets. We looked at the licensure of nurses at the nursing home, as well as the number of hours those nurses spent with patients, in determining our score in this category. With a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day, this nursing home's nurse staffing levels were far below average. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. This place performed well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these statistics to be good measures of the quality of nursing care.