St Catherine of Siena

In addition to being an elite facility overall, this nursing home also excelled in our inspections category, where it received a grade of A+. Very few nursing homes performed as well in this area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively minor. While this place had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among this nursing home's other strengths is its dominant long-term care score. It received one of our best grades in that area, with a grade of A-. When facilities receive a grade in this range in this category it typically means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. One of the factors we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccines. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a proven method to minimize unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the nursing home population. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Turning to the third category, this nursing home also received a score of B for its short-term care rating. This is a well above average score in this area. In our short-term care grade, we strive to craft a valuable measure for rehabilitation. In doing so, we assess the nursing home's level of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients that were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

The final area we scored was nursing. In that area, we gave this facility a solid grade of C. This turned out to be this nursing home's least impressive category. We weighed the licensure of nurses employed by the facility, as well as the quantity of hours the nurses worked with residents, in calculating our score in this category. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a much lower figure than we were hoping for. Lastly, we also baked a few quality-based metrics into our nursing ratings. This nursing home was relatively weak in a few of the major metrics we look at, with below average scores for minimizing its patients' major falls and pressure ulcers. These areas are usually decent measures of the quality of nursing care offered.