Saint Francis Hospital

In addition to being a first-rate facility overall, this facility also excelled in our short-term care category, where it received an A+. Few facilities fared better in this category. Our short-term care grade is typically employed to measure a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must offer better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final measure we assessed in this category is the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that 6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility excelled in our nursing rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. We analyzed the skill-level of nurses employed by the facility, as well as the quantity of time those nurses worked with residents, in determining our grade in this category. This nursing home averages 0.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Moving on our third category, this nursing home received an excellent long-term care grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in this area. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. We were not able to locate information on vaccination rates. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Wrapping up this facility's impressive profile, we gave this nursing home a score of A for our inspections rating. With this score, the nursing home completes its straight A report card. Our inspection ratings are based on several data points found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this area tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. 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.