St Mary Center for Rehabilitation & Healthcare

The primary reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it earned an elite inspection score. In fact, its inspection grade was far better than its overall grade. In the inspections category, we gave this facility a grade of A. Inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This place was assessed 11 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies an imminent threat to resident health or safety. A few minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing rating. In that category, we gave this nursing home an B-. There are several factors within this area. Most of these criteria reflect the quantity of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, we also looked at several nursing quality measures. While this facility got docked a bit for nursing hours, it excelled in a few of these quality-based metrics. With fewer than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it did remarkably well in this metric. This can be an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of turning patients more often.

We also gave this facility a solid grade in the area of long-term care, where we gave it a C. Our long-term care scores are more important for people in need of more conventional services associated with activities of daily living. One of the datapoints we considered on top of nurse's aid hours is vaccines. Candidly, we were a bit worried that this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to only 86.124405 percent of its patients. On a more positive note, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Turning to the last area, we gave this facility a D in short-term care. This is the nursing home's worst category rating. In computing our short-term care ratings, we scrutinize a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other types of therapists. This area is more often than not a fair measure of a facility's rehabilitation. With its grade in this category, we were not surprised to learn that this place was well below average in terms of the quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its patients based on the measures we looked at. Honestly, this was what we expected here. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.1 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.