Columbia St. Francis Hospital

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. When determining our nursing grades, we assess both staffing levels and the skill levels of those nurses. This nursing home boasts a really impressive 9.6 hours of nursing care per patient each day, of which a significant portion of those hours were provided by registered nurses. This is one of the most highly trained levels of nurses. This is among the highest totals of nursing hours we were able to find. On top of providing impressive levels of care, this nursing home also excelled in the quality measures we looked at. It performed as well as any nursing home in the state in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.

This facility also received an A+ short-term care grade, making it one of the few nursing homes to be given several A+ category grades. In our short-term care score, we strive to create a sound barometer for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we analyze a nursing home's level of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. This facility is substantially above average in terms of its quantity of both registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients. In fact, it provided about 1.5 times as much care per resident from both of these groups of skilled professionals than the typical nursing home provided. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of nursing homes in the nation in this area with 62.2 percent of its patients returning home. This is a significantly higher rate than most facilities.

The next area we looked at was long-term care. Adding to its superb resume, this facility also excelled in that category. In fact, it received a of A for the area. If you are seeking anything other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care grades. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. Unfortunately, it does not appear that this facility submitted vaccination data. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Finally, this nursing home also earned a nearly flawless inspection report. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with an A. With this impressive grade, this place is one of the few nursing homes in West Virginia to receive straight A's. Arguably the most important factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.