Ascension Living Casa Scalabrini Village

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. Our inspection grades are based on several pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this category have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This place was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to create an immediate risk to patient health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

Contributing to its top-shelf resume, this facility also performed well in our short-term care category. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- in the area. In our short-term care grade, we seek to create a meaningful gauge for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we look at the nursing home's offerings of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final datapoint we looked at in this category is the number of residents who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that 5.6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

This facility received a strong long-term care score as well. We awarded it one of our better grades in that area with a score of B. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 97.244095 percent of its residents, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is too frequently a life or death health condition for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home does not take any chances. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The next category we graded is nursing. We awarded this facility one of our higher grades in that area, with a B. While this wasn't as dominant as some of this facility's other scores, it is nevertheless a positive grade. There are numerous data points included in this category. Most of these criteria reflect the quantity of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed better than average in this area. This is often a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.