Mercy Rehab and Care Center

Although this nursing home's overall grade was horrible, it didn't perform quite as poorly in the area of long-term care. We awarded it a B- for that area, which isn't bad. Unfortunately, this was not enough to salvage its otherwise poor profile. Our long-term care grade focuses on a facility's personal care rather than the skilled nursing or medical services that are critical to a skilled nursing facility. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Thankfully, this nursing home gave the vaccine to 97.560974 percent of its patients, which is an above average percentage. Finally, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home also didn't fare terribly in the area of short-term care. Indeed, we awarded it a grade of C in that category, which happens to be among its better scores. In forming these short-term care ratings, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to devise a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. We found that this nursing home was below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. It offered fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. The last datapoint we assessed in this category is the number of patients that ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 5.2 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. This figure was below the national average.

This nursing home's inspections also weren't the source of this facility's rock bottom overall score. The facility received a C in this category. Inspection scores are tied to many datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important thing to look for on these inspections. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to patient safety. This place had 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were category G through L deficiencies. This means that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent danger to resident safety or health. Finally, CMS flagged this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. This is not what you want to see. We advise you to direct your search elsewhere.

The last category we assessed is nursing, turned out to be this nursing home's least impressive category. We gave this facility a grade of D in that area. When computing our nursing grades, we look at both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of those nurses. This place provided only 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. To go along with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this nursing home also did not perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of patients experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This facility had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average nursing home. This could be a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, these scores hurt this facility's nursing grade significantly.