Ascension Living Nazarethville Place

This facility received a strong overall grade as described above, but we especially wanted to point out its excellent inspections in recent years. We gave it an A- in this area. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these end up being relatively insignificant. This facility received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered severe. This indicates that the government inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies an imminent risk to resident health or safety. A few minor dings are not something to panic about.

We also gave this nursing home a grade of A- for our short-term care grade. Short-term care grades are generally employed to measure a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to have better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final item we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

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 grade looks at the facility's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of training of the nurses and the amount of time spent with residents. This facility provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next category we assessed is long-term care, which turned out to be this facility's worst category. We gave this facility a grade of D in this area. Sadly, this grade pulled down the nursing home's overall grade a bit. For patients in need of a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 99.590164 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this nursing home also keeps its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.