St Josephs Place

In addition to faring well overall, this nursing home earned nearly flawless government inspections. Consequently, it received one of our highest scores in that category with an A+. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection scores. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite minor. This place was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered severe. This means that the inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies to be an immediate risk to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. This turned out to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this facility an A+. Our nursing grade looks at the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of licensure of the nurses as well as the number of hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

In the third category we looked at, this facility received high marks in the category of long-term care. Consequently, it received one of our highest grades in that area with a of A+. For prospective residents in need of a permanent place to live rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are very important. On top of considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 93.181816 percent of its patients. This is a bit below what we anticipated but still a respectable percentage. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Moving on to our last area, this facility also was given an A+ short-term care grade, leaving it as one of the few of nursing homes to earn straight A+'s. In forming these short-term care ratings, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our purpose is to formulate a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final statistic we considered in this area is the number of residents that were able to return home from the facility. We found that 5.5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.