St Francis Health Services

To pair with its decent overall grade, we gave this nursing home an A+ for its inspection grade. This grade is far better than its overall rating. Inspection scores are tied to several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

Another one of this facility's more impressive category grades was in the category of long-term care. In that area, we gave this facility a B. It actually fared better than most nursing homes in this category. Facilities that do well in this category tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. After we finished looking at the volume of nursing care, we then looked at the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 99.082565 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is often a deadly ailment for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a facility does not leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home's nursing grade appears to be one of its better features. The facility received a grade of C in this category. In computing a nursing home's nursing rating, we weigh the number of hours nurses spend with patients and the level of skill of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is a lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures. While this facility got dinged a bit for its nursing hours, it actually excelled in some of these quality-based metrics. With less than five percent of its residents experiencing pressure ulcers, it fared remarkably well in this area. This is often an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of moving a patient more frequently.

The last category we analyzed was short-term care. We gave this facility a grade of C in that area. In determining these short-term care scores, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The purpose is to formulate a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of different facilities. We weren't able to find information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.3 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.