Saint Joseph Care Center

In addition to being a first rate nursing home overall, it also excelled in inspections, where it received an A. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these end up being 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. This is really what you want to see on an inspection report.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A. The nursing grade considers a number of datapoints. The most important factor is the quantity of hours nurses spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, 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.

Turning the page to our next area, we awarded this facility a grade of A- for our short-term care rating. This is a dominant grade. Our short-term care scores are probably more important for those in need of rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically mandates higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not only nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

The final category we rated was long-term care. This facility was given a better than average long-term care rating this year, with a B-. Although this isn't quite as good as many of its other scores, this is nevertheless a decent rating for that area. In the category of long-term care, we weigh the amount of services provided by a nursing home, rather than more sophisticated services. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Finally, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.