St James Nursing Center

Although we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a grade of C for our nursing rating. We weighed the levels of nurses at the facility, as well as the number of hours those nurses worked with residents, in calculating our score in this category. This nursing home provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a low total compared with most other facilities. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home surprisingly excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. It performed well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these areas to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.

Sadly, this facility received an F for its long-term care grade. Facilities that receive this type of score in long-term care may not provide the type of consistent around the clock care that some other facilities offer. After assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. Candidly, we were a bit bothered by the fact that this facility vaccinated 48.466255 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which happens to be quite a bit lower than what we were hoping for. Surprisingly, this place 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 is its best feature in this category.

We wanted to point out that this nursing home received a lowly F for its inspection rating. An F in this area is alarming because it generally points to red flags on the facility's inspections. For places with poor inspection grades, you should scrutinize any severe deficiencies found on their recent inspection reports. This facility had 7 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they created a risk to resident health or safety. Lastly, this facility was flagged by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. We prefer to avoid facilities with this designation. Please do your best to find an alternative nursing home.

The final category we analyzed is short-term care. It received an abysmal F for this category, which is a bottom of the barrel grade. In the category of short-term care, we strive to assess measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We look at a facility's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. This wasn't a strength for this facility. We found that just 3 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, about half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.