Alliance Health at Marie Esther

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home received an A+ in the area of long-term care. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. One of the datapoints we considered after nursing hours is vaccines. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 96.55173 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a proven method to avoid negative health outcomes for the aged 65 and up population. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility has received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. Inspection scores weigh a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher scores in this area generally have very few severe deficiencies. This nursing home received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of these deficiencies to cause an immediate threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. In computing our nursing scores, we assess both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The final category we rated was short-term care, where this facility was given a grade of A-. This topped off an elite report card. Very few facilities received an A- or higher in in each area we assessed. Our short-term care grades are based in part on a facility's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a broad spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final metric we looked at in this area is the number of patients that returned home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.