St Catherine Laboure Health Care Center

St Catherine Laboure Health Care Center is an average-sized hospital-based nursing home located in Buffalo, New York. This nursing home received a superb overall score of A, making it ranked among the top five facilities in the city. Even in a city featuring 20 other nursing homes, this facility would be a great option. Scroll down to see this facility's category grades, which are equally impressive. You really can't do any better than a straight A profile.

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Our inspection grades are based on items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this area have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this place had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Compounding its dominant accomplishments in other areas, we gave this facility a score of A for our long-term care rating. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. This facility's vaccination data were a bit weaker than some of its other datapoints in this area, such as its number of nursing hours per resident. It provided the pneumonia vaccine to just 84.98023 percent of its residents. We would love to see some improvement in this area in the future. Lastly, we looked at the nursing home's number of hospitalizations. While it had 2.49 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, its risk adjusted statistic was middle of the road since it had some more complicated patients.

Turning the page to our next area, this nursing home received an excellent short-term care grade. In fact, we gave it a score of A- in this category. In our short-term care grade, we endeavor to create a sound barometer for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we look at a nursing home's scope of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. This nursing home provides a decent amount of services from physical therapists and registered nurses based on our assessment. The final metric we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that it fared as well as just about any facility in New York in this area with 57.8 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, at most facilities, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return home.

In the last category, we gave this nursing home an A+ for its nursing grade. This topped off a very strong profile. Nursing grades are tied to quality and quantity of nursing care. This nursing home provides an incredible 4.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is much better than what is offered by most nursing homes. Lastly, we also looked at nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing scores. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these areas as reliable measures of the caliber of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.