Minerva Eldercare Center

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this place also excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned a grade of A. Few facilities performed better in this area. These inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This place received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Turning to the area of long-term care, we awarded this facility a grade of A- in that category. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically provide patients with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. One of the criteria we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccines. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its residents. This is a great way to minimize negative health outcomes for the aged 65 and up population. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The third area we analyzed is short-term care, where this nursing home was awarded a C in this category. In determining our short-term care grades, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our objective is to create a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 4.5 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

This nursing home's worst category is nursing, which is the final category we assessed. In this area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of D. The nursing rating analyzes quite a few factors, but the paramount one is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. With a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily, this facility's nurse staffing levels were far below average. To go along with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, 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 percentage of patients sustaining pressure ulcers and major falls. This facility had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average facility. This could be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These scores pulled down this facility's nursing grade quite a bit.