St. Joseph's Nursing Home

In addition to being an elite nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a grade of A+. Few nursing homes fared this well in this area. Inspection grades account for several factors found on a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category usually have very few of these severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility excelled in our nursing rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Our nursing score is mostly associated with the facility's nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 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 place Maryland in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of turning a patient more often.

This facility also was awarded a top-shelf long-term care grade. This actually ended up being this facility's third strongest category score. In that area, we gave this facility a score of A. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in this category it is usually a good sign for resident care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. After considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In our final category, we gave this nursing home a grade of A+ for our short-term care rating. This wrapped up an elite report card. In computing our short-term care ratings, we analyze the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This score is generally a meaningful assessment of a facility's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last measure we assessed in this category is the number of patients who eventually returned home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.