St. Joseph's Nursing Home

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Inspection grades are based on several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this area have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This means the government 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.

Contributing to this nursing home's list of accomplishments, it also received a very favorable long-term care grade. We awarded them a dominant strong of A- in this category. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 99.37888 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia can be a life or death health condition for nursing home patients so we like it when a nursing home does not take any chances. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Adding to its profile, this facility also earned a grade of B+ for its nursing rating. This is a well above average score in this category. Our nursing category weighs quite a few components, most of which are tied to nursing hours. This nursing home provides 3.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some quality-based measures in this category. This nursing home fared well in some of the quality measures we looked at. By way of illustration, in terms of the percentage of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, this place performed better than the national average. This is generally an indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided with better nursing care.

The next area we graded was short-term care. In this category, we gave this nursing home an acceptable grade of B-. This ended up being this facility's weakest category. In determining our short-term care scores, we scrutinize a facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. This area is frequently a reliable assessment of a nursing home's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last metric we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is below average.