The Shepherd's Center

One of the reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it earned an impressive inspection rating. In fact, inspections is its best category grade. In this area, we gave it an A. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This nursing home was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that the inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to create 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 was awarded an impressive long-term care grade as well. We gave it one of our better grades in that category with a grade of B+. For patients seeking a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care grades are a key measure. After assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 53.465347 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is a bit less than we were hoping for but still a respectable figure. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we like to see, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility is also above average in the area of short-term care, where it received a score of B+. It outpaced most nursing homes in this category. Short-term care grades are based in part on the nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a wide scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final measure we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

The last category we graded is nursing. In this category, we awarded this nursing home a very solid grade of B. Our nursing grade analyzes the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We consider both the levels of licensure of those nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these data points as good measures of the caliber of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.