Little Sisters of the Poor in Richmond

Even though we graded this facility extremely poorly overall, it earned a more respectable long-term care grade this year. We gave it a B- in that category. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary objective is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients. Lastly, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Interestingly, this facility's terrible overall grade can't really be attributed to its inspection reports. We awarded it a C for our inspections rating. Our inspection scores account for several factors included in a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. This facility was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to find that none were in category J, K or L. This means that inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to put patient health or safety in imminent harm or jeopardy. Another red flag is that CMS cited this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. Hopefully, its performance improves in the future, but until then we simply can't recommend this facility.

This nursing home wound up receiving a a terrible score in our short-term care category. It received an F in this category. In computing our short-term care scores, we look at a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This rating is often a useful measure of a facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. With a grade in this range for this category, we weren't surprised to discover that this facility was well below average in many staffing metrics we looked at. In fact, it supplied significantly fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most other facilities. Finally, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Turning to the final category, this nursing home didn't perform very well in this area either. With a very poor grade of F in nursing, this is just about as terrible as it gets. Our nursing grade is based on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of training of those nurses as well as the number of hours spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. To go along with its low total nursing hours per patient, this place had poor marks in several of the quality-based metrics we looked at in determining our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of patients experiencing falls which led to major injury. This facility was at more than 1.5 times the national average in this statistic.