St. Francis Senior Ministries

One of the reasons this is a decent facility is that it received a very favorable inspection grade. In that category, we gave this nursing home a B+. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection scores. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these end up being relatively minor. This place was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home 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 B-. In computing a facility's nursing grade, we look at the number of hours nurses are with patients as well as the level of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place actually fared better in some of the quality measures we looked at. It scored well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the number of hours of care provided.

This nursing home's third most favorable category was long-term care. We awarded it a C in this category. This is essentially a middle of the pack grade in this category. With our long-term care rating, we look at the volume of services provided by a nursing home, along with a series of quality datapoints. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 93.822395 percent of its residents. This is somewhat below what we expected but still a respectable figure. Nevertheless, this facility was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This nursing home's worst category is short-term care, which is the last category we looked at. For this category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of just D. In the category of short-term care, we endeavor to assess measures of a facility's rehabilitation. We analyze a facility's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. With a grade in this range in this category, we were not stunned to learn this nursing home was well below average in several staffing metrics we looked at. In fact, it provided far fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most facilities. The last metric we looked at in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 5 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar metrics doomed this nursing home's short-term care score.