Mount Vernon Health Care Center

To go along with its decent overall grade, we awarded this nursing home an A- for our nursing rating. This score is far more impressive than the facility's overall score. Our nursing score analyzes the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of training of those nurses and the amount of time spent with patients. This nursing home averages 3.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed 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 place the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a policy of turning a patient more often.

This facility's second best category is inspections. In that category, we gave this facility a B. It actually outperformed most nursing homes in this category. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this category most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

This nursing home's next highest category was its short-term care grade, where it was awarded a grade of B-. In determining our short-term care ratings, we size up a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other licensed professionals. This rating is generally a reliable measure of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, this nursing home offers both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities offer both. Finally, we considered the number of patients who ultimately returned home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well below average.

The last category we rated was long-term care. In this category, we gave this facility a grade of C. For prospective residents in need of a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. Once we concluded our assessment of the volume of care provided by nurses, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 91.279076 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Nevertheless, this nursing home was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.