Saint Joseph Care Center

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this facility performed even better in the area of inspections which is based on the facility's recent government inspection reports. In fact, we gave it an A for that area, which is one of our highest scores. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection ratings. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some are relatively minor. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. You really can not do much better than a deficiency-free inspection report.

Adding to this nursing home's list of strengths, it also received an excellent nursing grade. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. Nursing grades are based in large part on quantity of nursing care available. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at 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 nursing home the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a policy of turning patients more often.

The third most favorable category we awarded this nursing home in any area came in the category of long-term care, where we gave it a grade of B-. Our long-term care ratings are more critical for patients needing more traditional services related to activities of daily living. One of the factors we considered on top of nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. Fortunately, this facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 99.39759 percent of its residents. This place was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The next area we graded is short-term care. This nursing home received an above average short-term care score this year, with a grade of B-. Even though this isn't as good as some of its other category grades, this is still a respectable score in that area. In determining our short-term care grades, we size up the facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This category is considered to be a reliable measure of the facility's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents who ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 3.8 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was actually well below average.