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. Inspection grades are based on several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this category typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

This facility also received an A+ for its short-term care score. With our short-term care category, we seek to craft a sound measure for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we look at the facility's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Remarkably, this nursing home provides about 50% more services from physical therapists and registered nurses than most nursing homes we looked at. This is a very favorable sign. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of facilities in the country in this area with 67.5 percent of its patients returning home.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category. Our nursing rating assesses several subcategories, but the primary consideration is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provides an incredible 6.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Out of this total, many of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the most highly trained levels of nurses. In addition to looking at levels of nursing care, we also looked at a few quality measures in determining our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these areas as reliable measures of the quality of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

The final category we graded was long-term care, in which this facility received a grade of B-. While this turned out to be its poorest category score, this is still not a major area of concern. Long-term care grades are often used to gauge a nursing home's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing on the skilled nursing services provided by a rehabilitation facility. On top of offering above average levels of nurse staffing, this nursing home gave the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Finally, this facility 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.