St Joseph's Bluffs

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our short-term care rating. In calculating our short-term care scores, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our goal is to devise a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who returned home from this nursing home. We found that 6.1 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

This facility also received a dominant long-term care grade. Indeed, this is this nursing home's second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a score of A-. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 81.08108 percent of its residents. This is a few points less than we were hoping for but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we had hoped, we were pleased to find facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

In addition, this nursing home also earned excellent government inspections in recent years. We gave it one of our best grades in that category, with an A-. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some are quite minor. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The last area we analyzed is nursing. This nursing home received an impressive nursing grade this year, with a grade of B. Although this was not nearly as good as several of its other grades, this is nevertheless one of the more impressive grades in this area. In calculating a facility's nursing grade, we consider the number of hours nurses spend with patients as well as the level of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these statistics as good indicators of the caliber of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.