Shannon Medical Center - St. John's

On top of being an elite facility overall, this nursing home excelled in our inspections category, where it received an A+. Few facilities fared as well in this category. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. It does not appear that we were able to find deficiency counts for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Another reason we assessed this facility so favorably is that it was awarded an A+ short-term care score. This is flat out as good as it gets in this area. Short-term care scores are meaningful for residents needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires additional highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes a vast spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents that ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 7.1 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This nursing home also received an A+ nursing grade, making it one of the few nursing homes to receive multiple A+ category grades. When determining a nursing home's nursing rating, we consider the number of hours nurses are caring for residents as well as the level of skill of those nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can typically be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

In our final area, this nursing home also received an excellent long-term care grade, with a grade of A. This rounded out a very strong profile. In a long-term care environment, the primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. After looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination records. Unfortunately, we were not able to find this place's vaccination data. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.