Columbia St. Francis Hospital

Columbia St. Francis Hospital is a facility in Charleston, West Virginia, which has 116,525 people. This turns out to be an A+ rated facility. Receiving an A+ in our grading scheme takes superb performance across the board. In addition, this facility is also based in a hospital, which can often mean the nursing home offers more extensive medical services. One of the major highlights of this facility's stellar profile is its nursing grade. Nursing grades are discussed in the next section.

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. We assessed the qualifications of nurses working for the facility, in addition to the number of hours those nurses were with patients, in determining our score in this area. This nursing home boasts a really impressive 7.4 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 skilled levels of nurses. This is one of the better totals of nursing hours we were able to find. In addition to offering impressive levels of care, this nursing home also excelled in the quality measures we assessed. By way of illustration, it performed as well as any facility in the country in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these statistics as predictive measures of the quality of nursing care provided.

An additional reason we rated this facility so highly is that it received an A+ short-term care grade. This is flat out as strong as it gets in this area. Short-term care grades are crucial for patients seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates more skilled nursing. This means a vast scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. This nursing home is the gold standard when it comes to skilled nursing staffing. The facility provided about 50% more registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the typical nursing home. This is what we look for when assessing a nursing home in this category. The last datapoint we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it performed as well as just about any facility in West Virginia in this area with 60 percent of its residents returning home. At most facilities, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

Amazingly, we also awarded this nursing home yet another A+ in the area of inspections. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. 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.

Turning to our next category, this nursing home also was given an A+ long-term care score, making it one of the few of nursing homes to be awarded straight A+'s. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. We were not able to track down information on vaccination rates. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.