St. Mary's Hospital

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also was awarded an A+ short-term care grade, making it one of the few nursing homes to be awarded several A+ category grades. Our short-term care ratings are arguably most important for folks in need of a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last datapoint we looked at in this area is the number of patients who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that 7.3 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

This nursing home also received an A+ for its nursing grade. When computing a facility's nursing rating, we assess the quantity of hours nurses are with patients and the skill levels of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The final area we rated was long-term care, where this nursing home was given a grade of A. This finished off a very strong report card. Few nursing homes received an A- or higher in every category. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. On top of considering the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Unfortunately, we weren't able to track down this place's vaccination data. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.