The Jefferson

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ short-term care grade. Our short-term care grades are arguably more important for people needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not just nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. 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. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 7 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Adding to its impressive category scores, this nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned a grade of A. Not many nursing homes performed as well in this area. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are quite insignificant. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This means that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple relatively minor deficiencies are not something to panic about.

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.

The final category we assessed is long-term care. This nursing home was given an impressive long-term care grade in our assessment, with a B-. Even though this was not as elite as many of its other scores, this remains a decent score in that area. In calculating our long-term care grades, we look at the personal care received by a nursing home's patients. After looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. We weren't able to track down this facility's vaccination rates. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.