The Jefferson

To pair with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. In forming our short-term care scores, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our objective is to devise a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final measure we considered in this area is the number of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that 7.2 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Adding to its impressive category scores, this facility excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Inspection scores are tied to items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this area typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This tells you that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that category. When computing a nursing home's nursing score, we consider the amount of time nurses are caring for residents as well as the level of skill of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of turning patients even once per day.

Turning to our next category, this nursing home also performed well in our long-term care category. In fact, we gave it an A in this area. This rounded out a straight A report card. Nursing homes that receive this type of score in long-term care tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to ensure residents are well cared for. After considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination record. We were not able to locate this facility's vaccination rates. Clearly, this place 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 one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.