New Athens Home for the Aged

With an address in New Athens, Illinois, New Athens Home for the Aged is the sole facility we were able to find in this city. With an overall grade of B+, this nursing home should work for most people. At the end of the day, this nursing home is a solid choice for quite a few people. The best part of this nursing home's impressive report card is its inspection grade. We discuss inspections in the next paragraph

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Inspection ratings are based on several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This nursing home received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered severe. This tells you that the inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among the reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it was given a favorable long-term care grade. In fact, long-term care ended up being its second most favorable category grade. In that area, we gave this nursing home a grade of A-. Facilities that receive this kind of score in this category typically provide consistent around the clock care to ensure patients are well cared for. After considering the volume of nursing care, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 97.05882 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly can be a life or death ailment for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 1.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than most nursing homes.

In addition, this facility also received favorable nursing grades this year. In fact, we awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. In calculating a facility's nursing score, we look at the amount of time nurses spend with residents as well as the level of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home averages 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these datapoints as predictive indicators of the quality of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

Turning to our last category, this facility received a respectable short-term care score. Even though this is not quite as impressive as some of its other grades, this is truly not a poor grade. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to gauge a facility's rehabilitation services. To provide high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally must feature higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Unfortunately, it does not look like this facility provided data regarding its registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The last item we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 27.8 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.