Mercy Health Services

While we were not very complementary of this facility's overall grade, it actually received an impressive grade of A- in the area of nursing. Nursing scores are heavily correlated with quantity of nursing care available. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a system of turning residents more frequently.

This facility's second most favorable category is short-term care, but even there it received just a D in that category. This is still a well below average grade. Short-term care grades are based on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a vast spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. Based on its grade in this category, we were not stunned to learn that this facility was well below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the metrics we assessed. Finally, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 3.2 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Unfortunately, this nursing home only received a grade of D for its long-term care grade, which is not one of our better scores. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 90.196075 percent of its residents. This is multiple points less than what we were hoping for. To our surprise, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home had less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This was its best feature in this category.

The last category we looked at was inspections. Unfortunately, this ended up being this facility's worst grade. We gave it just a D in this area. Since this data is compiled by independent government inspectors, we weight it heavily in our grading. Our inspection grades weigh many items found on the nursing home's recent inspection reports. If you see too many deficiencies on the reports, this is typically the worst sign. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to resident safety. This particular facility was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only positive thing we found is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they caused a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, we also want to point out that this facility was assessed large government fines recently amounting to over $100,000. This generally indicates that a facility's bad performance spanned more than one year.