St John Specialty Care Center

On top of earning a strong overall grade, this facility performed well in our short-term care category. We awarded it an impressive grade of A- for that category. In our short-term care assessment, we seek to craft a sound measure for rehabilitation. In this process, we analyze a nursing home's offerings of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last statistic we assessed in this area is the number of residents who were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 5.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Adding to its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this facility a grade of B+ for our nursing rating. Our nursing score is mostly tied to a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a system of moving patients even once per day.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it excelled in the area of inspections, with a B in that category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection grades. One of those factors is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively insignificant. While this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

The final area we looked at was long-term care. This nursing home was given a B- for this area. Long-term care grades are typically used to gauge a nursing home's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services provided by a rehabilitation facility. One of the factors we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours was vaccines. Fortunately, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 98.101265 percent of its patients. Lastly, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.