St Joseph's Transitional Care Unit

In addition to faring well overall, this facility earned nearly flawless government inspections. Therefore, it received one of our best grades in that area with an A+. Arguably the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing score. Nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we gave this facility an A+. Nursing grades are based largely on quantity of nursing care available. This nursing home provides 0.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home also was dominant in the category of long-term care, where we gave it a score of A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. After looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination statistics. It does not look like this nursing home provided vaccination data. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The last area we analyzed is short-term care, where this facility was awarded an A. This topped off an elite report card. Only a select few facilities earned an A- or higher in in each area we assessed. In computing our short-term care ratings, we analyze a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This area is more often than not a reliable assessment of the facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who were able to return home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.