St Alexius Transitional Care Unit

St Alexius Transitional Care Unit is a facility in Bismarck, North Dakota, which has 78,133 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 inspection reports. Inspection grades are discussed in the next section.

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Our inspection grades weigh several factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better grades in this area tend to have few of these severe deficiencies. This place was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This top notch facility also performed well in the category of short-term care, where we awarded it a score of A+. Very few nursing homes fared better in this area. In determining these short-term care grades, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The objective is to create a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. This facility is significantly above the national average in terms of its quantity of both registered nurse and physical therapy hours available to its patients. The facility offered roughly 50% more care per patient from both of these care providers than the average facility provided. The final metric we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that it fared as well as just about any nursing home in North Dakota in this area with 70.4 percent of its residents returning home. At most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

This nursing home also was given an A+ for its long-term care score. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary objective is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccinations. It doesn't appear that this facility provided vaccination data. 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 only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

In our final category, this nursing home also was awarded a first-rate nursing score, with an A-. This finished off a first-rate report card. Our nursing grade is mostly tied to a nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home provided 7.6 hours of nursing care per resident daily, which is among the higher figures in the country. A significant percentage of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are one of the most highly skilled levels of nurses. We are really impressed by both of these statistics. In addition to offering impressive levels of nursing 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 state when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these areas as predictive indicators of the quality of nursing care offered.