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 received an impressive grade of A in our nursing 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 99.39394 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.

The next category we analyzed was short-term care, where this facility was awarded a grade of B. Even though this proved to be its lowest category score, this is nevertheless an above average score. In determining our short-term care grades, we size up the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This score is typically a solid measure of the facility's rehabilitation services. Unfortunately, it does not look like this facility provided information on registered nurse or physical therapist staffing. The final metric we considered in this category is the percentage of patients that eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.