St. Francis Heights Convalescent Hospital

On top of being a first rate facility overall, this nursing home also excelled in the category of nursing, where it received an A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Our nursing score is primarily based on a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided 4.5 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This was one of the highest totals we found. In addition, a significant percentage of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. Both of these statistics are impressive. On top of providing high levels of nursing care, this nursing home also excelled in several of the quality measures we assessed. With under 5 percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the nation in this category.

On the list of its many dominant grades, this facility was awarded a strong short-term care grade. In fact, it received a grade of A in that category. In calculating our short-term care grades, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to devise a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of various facilities. When we assessed this place's nursing hours, we found it provided significantly more care from registered nurses than most nursing homes. Finally, we looked at the number of residents that ultimately returned home from this nursing home. It fared as well as just about any nursing home in the nation in this area with 62.1 percent of its residents returning home.

This nursing home also excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned an impressive grade of B+. Few facilities performed better in this area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively insignificant. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that CMS 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.

The final area we scored was long-term care, where this nursing home was awarded a grade of B-. Although this proved to be its weakest category score, this is nevertheless not a terrible score. Long-term care grades are typically used to assess a facility's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services provided by a skilled nursing facility. After looking at the above average volume of nursing care provided by this nursing home, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which appears to be higher than the average nursing home. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.69 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.