Mercy Circle

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home received an A+ in the area of short-term care. In computing these short-term care grades, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our purpose is to formulate a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final statistic we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who returned home from the facility. We found that 6.8 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

We also wanted to point out the fact that this facility fared very well in our long-term care rating. We awarded them an elite grade of A+ in this category. Facilities that do well in this category tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is much higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home has received near flawless government inspections in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A in this area. Inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In the last category we rated, this nursing home was given an impressive grade grade of A- in our nursing category. With this score, the nursing home finished off a straight A profile. The nursing score is based on quite a few factors, most of which are based on nursing hours. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.