Mercy Franciscan at West Park

Although we gave this nursing home a horrible overall score, we gave it an A- for our inspections rating. This grade is far more impressive than the facility's overall grade. Inspection grades account for several factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. You should avoid nursing homes with too many severe deficiencies flagged. Although this place had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

Turning to the area of short-term care, this nursing home received a grade of just D in this category. Unfortunately, this wound up being one of its better features. Short-term care grades are generally used to grade a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to provide quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This was not a strength for this facility. We found that just 4.7 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. At most facilities, about half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.

We also wanted to point out that this nursing home received an F for its nursing grade. Our nursing rating weighs a handful of factors, however, the primary one is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing scores. This facility performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these datapoints to be measures of the quality of nursing care.

The final category we scored was long-term care. This nursing home was given a bottom of the barrel grade of F in that category. When nursing homes receive this type of grade in long-term care it is often a bad sign for patient care and it may indicate that the facility is not as well-staffed with nurses and aids. After looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination record. We were disappointed to learn that this nursing home vaccinated only 42.205322 percent of its patients for pneumonia. To our surprise, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than many nursing homes. This was its best score in this category.