St. Leonard Health Care Center

This nursing home's nursing score outpaced its overall rating. We gave it a B+ for its nursing grade, which is one of our better scores. The nursing category includes a handful of factors, most of which are associated with nursing hours. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics 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 facility the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a system of turning a resident at least once a day.

Additionally, we awarded this facility a B+ in our short-term care category. This happens to be one of our higher scores. Short-term care ratings are based in part on the facility's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a broad scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, in addition to other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final statistic we looked at in this category is the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that 5.3 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

This nursing home's inspection score also was quite a bit better than its overall grade. Due to a strong inspection report this year, it received one of our better scores in that category with a B. Inspection scores are tied to items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this area have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

Turning to our last area, we awarded this nursing home a D for long-term care. This is the facility's worst category score. Naturally, this category hurt the nursing home's overall profile a bit. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids, as well as the levels of routine medical care available. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 91.666664 percent of its residents. This is slightly below what we were hoping for but still a decent percentage. Surprisingly, this facility actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.