Ascension Living Saint Benedict Village

With an overall grade this high, it should come as no surprise that this nursing home performed well in the area of inspections, where it earned a grade of A. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection grades. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being relatively insignificant. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing rating. In that category, we awarded this facility an A-. There are several datapoints within this category. Many of these factors reflect staffing levels. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Turning the page to our next area, we gave this nursing home a grade of A- for its short-term care grade. This is a first-rate grade. Short-term care grades are based on the facility's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a wide scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, in addition to other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final item we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that 5.3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

In the final area, this nursing home also was given a very strong long-term care rating, with a grade of B+. This finished off a very impressive profile. Facilities that do well in this category tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia can be a dangerous illness for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility doesn't leave this to chance. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it 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 a remarkably low figure.