Signature Healthcare of Erin

This nursing home received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its nearly flawless health inspection reports in recent years. We gave them an A in this category. Our inspection scores are based on datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this area typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. A few minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

This facility's next highest category turned out to be its short-term care grade, where it was awarded a grade of B-. Our short-term care scores are based on the facility's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a vast range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other types of therapy. We were surprised to find that this place was below average in the two key staffing areas we focus on. It provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. It is still important to determine whether this is adversely impacting the quality of care. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.6 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

We also awarded this nursing home a solid grade in the area of long-term care, with a grade of C. Long-term care grades focus on a facility's personal care rather than the highly skilled therapy and medical services that are critical to a rehabilitation facility. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Candidly, we were a bit concerned this nursing home vaccinated only 60.12862 percent of its residents. On a more positive note, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The final category we assessed was nursing. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F for this category, which is a poor score. This is obviously a significant concern. Our nursing rating consists of many data points, many of which are associated with nursing hours. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. To pair with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this nursing home also didn't fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We looked at the percentage of patients sustaining pressure ulcers and major falls. This facility had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average facility. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. These metrics pulled down this facility's nursing grade quite a bit.