St. Joseph Villa Nursing Center

Although we did not rate this facility well overall, we wanted to note its decent inspection reports in recent years. We gave it a relatively respectable score of B- in this area. Our inspection grades account for several factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. This place received 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to be an imminent risk to patient safety or health. Finally, CMS cited this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. Hopefully, its performance improves in the future, but until then we simply can't recommend this facility.

This facility's next most favorable area was short-term care. In that area, we gave this facility a B-. Our short-term care grades are thought to be more meaningful for folks in need of a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates additional skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not merely nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.2 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

The next highest category we awarded this facility in any area came in the area of long-term care, where we awarded it a grade of B-. In computing these long-term care grades, we analyze the nursing home's ability to maintain its permanent residents' health and quality of life. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination records. We were optimistic to discover that this facility vaccinated 98.97436 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Finally, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The last category we graded was nursing. For this category, we gave this facility a grade of C. We looked at the qualifications of nurses at the facility, in addition to the quantity of time those nurses were with residents, in determining our rating in this area. This place provides only 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a somewhat alarming figure which is well below the national average. Lastly, we also factored in some quality-based metrics in this category. While this nursing home did not rank highly in terms of nursing hours per resident, it fared much better in some of the quality measures we looked at. In terms of the percentage of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, this facility fared better than the national average. This is often a reliable indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided with better nursing care.