St John's United

We also found that this facility excelled at short-term care. We gave them an A+ in this category. In calculating our short-term care grades, we look at the facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This rating is generally a meaningful measure of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we looked at in this area is the number of patients that who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. We found that 6.6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. In fact, nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility an A. Our nursing grade looks at the facility's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of licensure of the nurses and the amount of time spent with patients. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Adding to its fine resume, this facility also was awarded a superb long-term care score, with a score of A. For prospective patients looking for a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care grades are very important. After assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 83.76963 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which happens to be somewhat less than we were hoping for but still a respectable figure. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we had hoped, at least this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Adding to its impressive category grades, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A-. This rounded out a straight A report card for this place. Inspection ratings account for several factors included in a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher grades in this category typically have very few severe deficiencies. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.