Sacred Heart Care Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Our nursing grade consists of many components, most of which are based on nursing hours. This nursing home averages 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a system of turning residents even once per day.

Turning to our inspection category, this facility excelled in that area, which is based on the nursing home's inspections. We awarded it an A for that category. Our inspection scores are tied to several datapoints found on the a nursing home's inspections. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this area have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the government inspectors didn't consider 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.

We also would like to point out the fact that this facility was given a high-end grade of A in our long-term care area. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care typically provide patients with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. After assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The last area we scored was short-term care. This nursing home was given a better than average short-term care grade in our assessment, with a grade of B-. Even though this was not nearly as good as some of its other grades, this is still an acceptable grade in that area. Our short-term care grades are based on a facility's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a broad range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 3.9 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.