St. Ann’s Community at Cherry Ridge

To pair with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is much higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This nursing home also received a virtually flawless inspection report. As a result, it earned one of our highest scores in that area with an A+. This was one of the few facilities to receive multiple A+'s. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection ratings. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some are quite insignificant. Unfortunately, we weren't able to track down deficiency counts for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category. We assessed the skill-level of nurses at the nursing home, as well as the quantity of time those nurses were with residents, in computing our grade in this area. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics 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 place the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a policy of turning patients at least once a day.

The next area we looked at was short-term care, where this facility was given a B. While this proved to be its least impressive category rating, this is still an impressive score. Short-term care ratings are based on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a broad range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last item we considered in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.