Little Sisters of the Poor

In addition to a phenomenal overall grade, this facility also received A+ nursing grade. When determining a nursing home's nursing score, we look at the amount of time nurses are seeing residents and the levels of training of those nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as having a system of moving a resident more often.

Adding to this nursing home's impressive resume, we awarded this facility an A- for our inspections rating. Our inspection scores are tied to pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent government inspections. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. A few relatively minor deficiencies aren't something to panic about.

This nursing home is also above average in the area of short-term care, where it was awarded a grade of B. It outpaced most facilities in this category. Our short-term care grade is often used to score a nursing home's rehabilitation services To provide highly scored rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide better levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this nursing home submitted data regarding its registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The final measure we looked at in this category is the percentage 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 patients were able to return home.

The last category we rated turned out to be this nursing home's poorest category. However, even its weakest link would be a strength for most facilities. We gave it a favorable grade of B for our long-term care category. Nursing homes that excel in this category typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is too frequently a dangerous ailment for nursing home residents so we like it when a nursing home doesn't leave this to chance. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.