Mary Goss Nursing Home

We gave this nursing home one of our better grades in long-term care, with an A. This is a much better grade than its overall score, which was decent but not in the elite range. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.04 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Inspections is another area where this nursing home excelled. We gave this nursing home an B+ for our inspections category. This is far more impressive than the facility's overall grade. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively insignificant. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We gave this facility just a D for our short-term care grade. This is not a very good score. Short-term care grades are typically employed to judge a nursing home's rehabilitation services To offer good rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. It looks like this facility was below average in many staffing areas we assessed. The facility supplied fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents that eventually returned home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

Switching gears to our next category, we gave this facility a grade of D for nursing. This is the nursing home's weakest category score. Sadly, this grade hurt the nursing home's overall grade to some degree. When calculating our nursing grades, we factor in both nursing hours and the skill levels of the nurses. This place offered only 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is not a very impressive figure. On top of receiving below average marks for total nursing hours, this nursing home was less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing ratings. We looked at the percent of patients suffering pressure ulcers and found this place was at roughly 1.5 times the national average in this metric.