St. John of God Retirement

While we didn't rate this facility favorably overall, we want to note its relatively favorable long-term care score this year. We gave it a B in this area. Nursing homes that receive this kind of score in long-term care typically provide consistent around the clock care to make sure residents are kept in good health. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 98.89908 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

We also gave this facility a strong grade in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of B. This is better than most nursing homes in this category. Nursing grades are based largely on quantity of nursing care available. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by having a system of moving residents even once per day.

Unfortunately, this facility received a lowly F for its inspection score. This is a particularly important category. Grades in this range often mean we found red flags on the nursing home's government inspection reports. We would advise paying close attention to any deficiencies on a nursing home's inspection reports when it receives this bad of an inspection score. We recommend you scrutinize the severity of the deficiencies. This particular facility was hit with 9 deficiencies by CMS. The only positive thing we found is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that suggest they caused a threat to resident safety or health. Lastly, we need to point out that this nursing home was assessed large government fines of more than $100,000. This generally signifies that a bad track record has been an issue for multiple years.

The next area we scored is short-term care. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F in this area, which is an abysmal grade. In determining our short-term care ratings, we scrutinize the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This category is generally a fair assessment of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Considering its grade in this category, we weren't stunned to find that this place was well below average in terms of the number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. Finally, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This wasn't a strength for this facility. We found that just 4 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.