St Mary's Alzheimer's Center

To go along with its favorable overall score, we gave this place an A+ for our inspections rating. Our inspection grades weigh several factors found on a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we rely on is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category typically have very few severe deficiencies. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. You can not go wrong with a deficiency-free inspection report.

In addition, this facility also was given favorable long-term care grades in our assessment. Indeed, we gave it one of our better scores in that area, with a score of B. Nursing homes that excel in this category tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. After considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 99.31507 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Turning to the category of nursing care, this facility didn't perform quite as well in this area as some of the categories discussed above. Nevertheless, a grade of B- in this category is by no means a bad score. Our nursing score weighs many factors, however, the primary one is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provides only 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a somewhat alarming figure which is well below average. Lastly, despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this facility actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is generally an indicator that a nursing home has sufficient quality controls in place.

Moving on to the last category, this facility was awarded a decent short-term care score of C. Short-term care grades are meaningful for people seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires more skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a vast scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, we were not able to track down information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The final metric we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.