Little Sisters of the Poor

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. In computing a nursing home's nursing score, we consider the number of hours nurses are caring for patients and the level of skill of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

We also wanted to emphasize this nursing home's nearly flawless government inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A- in this area. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with better grades in this category most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this facility had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

Turning to an additional strength for this nursing home, we gave them one of our higher scores in our short-term care category as well, with a B. In determining our short-term care ratings, we assess a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This category is considered to be a meaningful measure of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We weren't able to locate information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. The last datapoint we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The next category we assessed was long-term care, where we awarded it an above average grade of B. This nursing home really didn't have any weaknesses. Facilities that do well in long-term care tend to provide patients with more supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. Once we concluded our assessment of the amount of care provided by nurses, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly is often a life or death ailment for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a nursing home does not leave this to chance. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.