St James Living Center

Although we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we awarded it an A- for our inspections score. This grade is far more impressive than the nursing home's overall score. Our inspection grades are based on many pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are a key item to look for on these inspections. Most importantly, you should avoid facilities that have severe deficiencies linked to risks to resident well being. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

This nursing home ended up receiving a a very poor score in our long-term care category. It received an F in this area. When nursing homes receive this type of score in long-term care it is typically a bad sign for patient care and it may mean that the nursing home is not as well-staffed with nurses and aids. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses, we next considered the facility's vaccination record. Candidly, we were a bit worried that this nursing home vaccinated a relatively low 89.756096 percent of its patients for pneumonia. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually decent at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best score in this category.

Unfortunately, we gave this facility an F for its nursing grade. Nursing ratings are tied to nurse staffing levels. This particular place provided a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This statistic is significantly below the national average. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing ratings. This facility performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

The next area we assessed was short-term care, where this nursing home received a rock bottom score in this area as well. Sadly, it received a lowly F for this area, which is obviously very concerning. Short-term care grades are vital for patients in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a broad scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The final metric we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 4.1 percent of its patients returning home. This was well below the national average.