Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ short-term care grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. In the category of short-term care, we strive to assess measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last metric we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from the facility. We found that 7 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Adding to its impressive category scores, this nursing home also excelled in the category of inspections, where it received an A. Our inspection scores are tied to several datapoints located in the a nursing home's government inspections. Facilities that score well in this area typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities 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 government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means 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. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also was elite in the category of long-term care, where we gave it a grade of A. Few nursing homes fared better in this category. Nursing homes that receive this kind of grade in long-term care typically provide consistent around the clock care to ensure residents are kept in good health. Once we finished looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 97.0684 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia can be a life or death illness for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility does not leave this to chance. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The final category we graded was nursing, where this facility was given an A-. This completed a very strong report card. Few facilities earned an A- or better in every single category. We assessed the skill-level of nurses working for the nursing home, as well as the quantity of hours the nurses worked with residents, in determining our rating in this area. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place Rhode Island in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving a patient more frequently.