St Mary of the Woods

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Our inspection grades are tied to many items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this category have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This place was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered severe. This indicates that the government inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to patient health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

This nursing home also fared very well in the area of short-term care, where we gave it a score of A. Not many nursing homes received a better grade in this area. Our short-term care ratings are likely most important for residents in need of a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically mandates higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not just nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we considered in this category is the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 6.2 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. When computing our nursing grades, we weigh both nursing hours and the training levels of the nurses. This particular nursing home provided 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 place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The last category we graded is long-term care. This nursing home was awarded an impressive long-term care grade this year, with a B-. Although this wasn't quite as strong as many of its other scores, this remains an acceptable score in this category. In calculating our long-term care ratings, we assess the personal care received by a facility's residents. Once we concluded our assessment of the volume of nursing care, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination data. We were optimistic to discover that this nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. This facility was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.