St Elizabeth Ft Thomas Snf

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to alert you to the fact that this nursing home was superb in our short-term care rating. We gave them an elite grade of A+ in this category. Our short-term care grades are meaningful for individuals looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates additional highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes a wide spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Remarkably, this nursing home provides about 50% more services from physical therapists and registered nurses than most nursing homes we looked at. This is a very favorable sign. The final item we looked at in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it performed as well as just about any nursing home in Kentucky in this area with 74.9 percent of its patients returning home.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. Nursing grades are based largely on levels of nurse staffing. This particular facility provided 7.2 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This was one of the highest figures we found. In addition, a significant percentage of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. On top of offering high levels of care, this nursing home also excelled in the quality-based metrics we assessed. By way of illustration, it performed as well as any nursing home in Kentucky in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We look at these areas as good indicators of the caliber of nursing care being provided.

The final area we looked at is long-term care, where this nursing home received an A. This topped off an elite report card. Very few facilities earned an A- or higher in all four categories. If you are looking for anything other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care grades. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We weren't able to track down this facility's vaccination rates. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.