Our Lady of Angels Ret Home

This facility received a strong overall grade as described above, but we especially wanted to emphasize its excellent short-term care score. We gave them an impressive grade of A in this area. In crafting our short-term care scores, we analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to formulate a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Unfortunately, it does not appear that this nursing home provided data regarding its registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.4 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

This nursing home also excelled in inspections. We awarded it a grade of A for that area. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection grades. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite minor. This place was assessed 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple relatively minor deficiencies are not necessarily something to panic about.

This facility received a very good nursing grade this year as well. It received one of our better scores in that category with a grade of B. Our nursing rating consists of quite a few subcategories, many of which are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures 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 facility the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of moving a resident at least once a day.

Switching gears to the last area, we gave this nursing home a grade of D for our long-term care category. This was the nursing home's weakest category score. Of course, this category pulled down the nursing home's overall grade to a certain degree. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids, as well as the levels of routine medical care available. On top of considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 88.55721 percent of its residents. This is several points less than the national average. To our surprise, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. This is its best feature in this category.