Minerva Eldercare Center

To go along with its relatively modest overall grade, we gave this facility an A+ for our inspections rating. This score is far better than its overall rating. These inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Additionally, we gave this facility a B+ in our long-term care category. This happens to be one of our more favorable scores. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care typically provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility's next best area is short-term care. In that category, we gave this nursing home a C. In crafting these short-term care scores, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our objective is to create a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, this nursing home offers both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities offer both. The last item we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. This figure was below average.

The last area we looked at is nursing, which ended up being this facility's worst category. Sadly, it received an F in this area, which is clearly a major disappointment. Our nursing rating is based on a number of subcategories. The most important variable is the number of hours nurses spent with residents. This nursing home provides 2.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. To go along with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this facility also didn't fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and major falls. This nursing home had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average facility. This could be a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, these metrics hurt this nursing home's nursing grade significantly.