St. Francis Heights Convalescent Hospital

One of the reasons this proved to be a quality nursing home is that it received a very impressive short-term care rating. In fact, short-term care is its best category. In that area, we awarded this facility an A-. In determining our short-term care grades, we size up the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This area is more often than not a solid assessment of a facility's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last statistic we considered in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that 5.7 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. Our nursing score weighs many subcategories. The most important one is the number of hours nurses spent with residents. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This facility also performed well in our inspection category, which is based on the facility's recent government inspection reports. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B+ for that category, which is among our highest grades. Our inspection grades are based on many pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this category typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This nursing home was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe. This indicates that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to be an immediate threat to resident health or safety. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

This facility's worst category is long-term care, which is the final category we looked at. For this category, we gave this nursing home an D. If you are seeking services other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at long-term care scores. One of the factors we considered on top of nurse's aid hours was vaccinations. Thankfully, this facility administered the pneumonia vaccination to 99.632355 percent of its residents. Surprisingly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Sadly, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.