Concordia of the South Hills

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home received an A+ in the area of short-term care. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to judge a facility's rehabilitation services. To offer high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to feature higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final metric we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. We found that 7.1 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

In addition, this nursing home also received a nearly flawless inspection report. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with an A. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some are relatively insignificant. 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. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category. When computing a facility's nursing grade, we consider the number of hours nurses commit to patients as well as the levels of training of the nurses. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of turning a patient more frequently.

The last area we rated was long-term care, in which this nursing home received a B. This actually was this nursing home's least impressive category. A facility is doing something right when their weakest score still is better than most nursing homes. Nursing homes that receive this type of grade in long-term care tend to provide consistent around the clock care to make sure patients are kept in good health. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. We weren't able to locate this place's vaccination data. Clearly, this nursing home 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 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.