St Lawrence Rehab Center

To pair with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. In computing our short-term care grades, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The goal is to devise a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who ultimately returned home from this facility. We found that 6.7 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

This facility has also received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection scores. One of those factors is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively minor. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. Nursing grades are heavily correlated with nurse staffing levels. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home New Jersey in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a system of moving a patient even once per day.

The final area we looked at is long-term care, where this nursing home received a B-. Even though this ended up being its least impressive category rating, this is nevertheless not a bad grade. In our long-term care assessment, we focus more on the sheer volume of care provided by a facility, along with a handful of quality measures. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Unfortunately, we weren't able to find this facility's vaccination rates. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.