Saint Francis Nursing Home

The primary reason this nursing home received a decent overall score is its impeccable inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our higher scores in that area, with an A+. This is a much better score than the facility's overall grade, which was decent but certainly not elite. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection scores. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being relatively insignificant. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This tells you CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Another one of this facility's more impressive category scores came in the area of long-term care. In that category, we gave this facility a grade of B. When nursing homes receive this type of score in long-term care it is a good sign for patient care and indicates that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses aids. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 94.42897 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

One of this facility's better category grades was in the area of nursing care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of C. We assessed the licensure of nurses working for the facility, in addition to the quantity of time the nurses were with patients, in calculating our rating in this category. This facility provides only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is a somewhat alarming figure as it is well below average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home excelled in some of the quality measures we looked at. It scored well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be good measures of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the number of hours of care offered.

The next category we looked at was short-term care, is this nursing home's weakest area. We gave this facility a D in that area. This really is one of the couple of weak links of an otherwise impressive report card. Short-term care grades are vital for individuals requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires additional skilled nursing. This means a broad spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. The final measure we considered in this area is the number of residents who eventually returned home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 0 percent of its residents returning home. Unfortunately, this was quite a bit below average.