Laverna Village of St Joseph

Laverna Village of St Joseph is one of seven available facilities located in Saint Joseph, Missouri. We gave it an overall grade of C, which is a middle of the pack score. This grade was right in line with the city grade in Saint Joseph, which is admittedly a little below average nationally. The best part of this nursing home's profile is is its inspection reports. We discuss inspections in the next paragraph.

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this place also excelled in the category of inspections, where it received an A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with better scores in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This place received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered severe. This means that CMS didn't consider any of these deficiencies an immediate risk to resident health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This nursing home's second best area is its short-term care grade, where it received a grade of B-. Short-term care ratings are based on the facility's quantity of skilled nursing services. This includes a broad spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. The key is determining what effect this had on the quality of care. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients that who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home and discovered this was this facility's strongest datapoint within this area. We found that it performed well in this area with 57.2 percent of its residents returning home. Most nursing homes are below 50 percent in this statistic.

We also awarded this nursing home a solid grade in the category of long-term care, with a C. If you are seeking services other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care grades. Although we determined this facility has an above average volume of nursing care provided by aids and other nursing staff, we found its vaccination rate to be somewhat slightly lower than we anticipated. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to just 88.57143 percent of its residents. This is one statistic we would love to see this facility improve on. Lastly, we looked at the nursing home's number of hospitalizations. We found that this nursing home had 2.2 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. While this figure is quite a bit higher than the national average, this number may be skewed for some facilities based on the preexisting medical conditions of patients.

The next category we scored is nursing. We awarded this facility a C in that category. There are a number of subcategories within this area. Many of the data points are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides an impressive 3.9 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, our nursing grades also factor in some quality-focused statistics. Specifically, we look at the percent of residents who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these statistics as predictive measures of the quality of nursing care, since better care tends to reduce these problems.