Alliance Health at Marie Esther

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ long-term care grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Facilities that excel in long-term care tend to provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. Once we finished looking at the amount of nursing care, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 99.10715 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia tragically can be a life threatening illness for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave this to chance. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility also earned an A+ inspection score, making it one of the rare facilities to receive multiple A+'s in our category grades. Inspection grades are tied to several datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspections. Places that score well in this category typically have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This nursing home received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This tells you that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to create an immediate threat to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This first-rate facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Nursing ratings are mostly tied to the facility's nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home 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.

The last area we looked at was short-term care, where this facility received a grade of B+. This topped off a first-rate report card. Few facilities earned a B+ or better in every category. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to assess a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To provide highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of residents who ultimately returned home from this nursing home. We found that 4.1 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.