Advanced Health Care of St George

Located in Saint George, Utah, Advanced Health Care of St George is one of six nursing homes in this city. We awarded this facility an extremely impressive overall score of A+. It graded out better than the vast majority of the nursing homes in Saint George by a significant margin. We simply can't say enough favorable things about this place. Headlining this place's stellar report card is its inspection score, which is addressed in the next paragraph.

In addition to being a first rate nursing home overall, this nursing home also excelled in our inspections category, where it earned a grade of A+. Few places fared this well in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection ratings. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some can be quite insignificant. This nursing home was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that CMS didn't consider any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to note the fact that this nursing home fared very well in our short-term care category. We gave them an elite score of A+ in this category. Short-term care grades are commonly used to measure a facility's rehabilitation services. To provide high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. This facility is the gold standard when it comes to skilled nursing staffing. The facility provided about one and a half times as many registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the average nursing home. This is what we like to find when grading a nursing home in this category. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients that returned home from this facility. On top of excelling in the area of physical therapy hours, we found that it performed as well as just about any facility in the country in this area with 60.8 percent of its residents returning home. Most facilities are below 50 percent in this statistic.

Moving on our third category, this facility received a top-shelf long-term care grade. In fact, it received a grade of A in that category. For prospective residents seeking a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. One of the datapoints we considered after nursing hours was vaccinations. Unfortunately, it does not look like this nursing home submitted vaccination data. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Turning to our last area, this facility also performed well in the nursing category. In fact, we awarded it an A in this area. This rounded out a straight A report card. Nursing scores are based largely on levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home boasts a really impressive 6 hours of nursing care per patient per day, of which a significant portion of those hours were provided by registered nurses. This is one of the most highly highly trained levels of nurses. In addition to offering high levels of nursing care, this nursing home also excelled in the quality-based metrics we looked at. By way of illustration, it performed as well as any nursing home in the state in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these metrics as good measures of the quality of nursing care being provided.