Little Sisters of the Poor

Although this facility's overall grade was terrible, it fared well in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a B for that area, which is one of our better scores. Inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

As it turns out, this facility only earned a grade of D for its long-term care score, which happens to be one of its higher category grades. When facilities receive this kind of score in long-term care it is a bad sign for resident care and it may mean that the place is not as well-staffed. After assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination record. Candidly, we were a bit worried that this nursing home vaccinated 78.57143 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is quite a bit less than average. The last statistic we looked at was the facility's hospitalization rate. We found that this place had 1.92 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This is a higher hospitalization rate than most nursing homes, but it's not quite as bad as we expected.

Sadly, this facility's third best score was short-term care. However, with a grade of D in this category, it still fared relatively poorly. Our short-term care grades are considered to be more meaningful for individuals requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically requires more skilled nursing. This means not just nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Considering its weak rating in this category, we weren't surprised to find that this nursing home offered substantially fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most facilities. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely wasn't a strength for this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, around half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.

The final category we looked at was nursing. Sadly, it received a lowly F for this category, which is an abysmal score. Nursing scores are based largely on nurse staffing levels. With just 3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, this facility's nurse staffing levels were well below the national average. To pair with its below average total nursing hours per patient, this place had poor marks in several of the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing scores. For starters, we looked at the percent of residents experiencing falls leading to serious injury. This facility was at more than 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is alarming in light of the fact that many falls could be avoided with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the facility's fate of receiving a poor nursing grade.