Benedictine Madonna Towers

This nursing home really excelled in the category of short-term care, where it received an impressive grade of A. Few facilities fared better in this category. If it was not for this area, this nursing home's overall score would have been much lower. Our short-term care grades are considered to be more important for those in need of a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes more highly-skilled nursing. This includes not merely nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we considered in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that 5.8 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

This nursing home also excelled in our nursing category, where it received a grade of B. Few places performed better in this area. Nursing scores are mostly tied to the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures 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 nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a system of moving a patient more frequently.

Turning to government inspections, we gave this facility a grade of just D for our inspection category. This was one of this nursing home's weaker links. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. We would scrutinize the level of severity of the deficiencies. This nursing home had 3 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only favorable thing we found is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they posed a risk to resident health or safety. Finally, we would like to point out that this nursing home was assessed large government fines of over $100,000. This often indicates that a facility's bad performance has been an issue for more than one year.

This nursing home's worst category was long-term care, which is the final area we analyzed. It received a lowly F in this area. Despite several respectable scores in other areas, this grade is still disappointing so we would like to to make sure you are aware. Long-term care scores in this range generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids, as well as the levels of routine medical care available. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Candidly, we were a bit alarmed this facility vaccinated only 86.66667 percent of its patients. Surprisingly, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than many nursing homes. This was its best score in this category.