St Augustine Home

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Our inspection ratings are tied to items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this category typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few relatively minor dings are not necessarily something to panic about.

In addition, this facility also was awarded favorable short-term care scores in our assessment. In fact, we awarded it one of our stronger scores in that area, with a score of B+. In the category of short-term care, we endeavor to evaluate indicators of a facility's rehabilitation. We look at a nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final item we looked at in this area is the number of patients that returned home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

In addition, this facility also received favorable nursing grades this year. In fact, we awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. Our nursing score looks at the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of licensure of the nurses and the quantity of hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 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 place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The final area we rated is long-term care, where this nursing home was given a B. This facility ended up being relatively strong in all areas we analyzed. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. After considering the amount of nursing care, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia can be a deadly illness for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility doesn't leave this to chance. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.