St Francis Rehabilitation & Nursing Center

One of the reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received a very impressive short-term care grade. In fact, short-term care turned out to be its best category. In that category, we gave this facility an impressive grade of A-. Short-term care grades are commonly used to grade a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature better levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last item we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 5.1 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility earned an excellent nursing grade. We gave it an B+ in that category. Our nursing score is largely tied to a facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place Massachusetts in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a policy of turning a patient even once per day.

This facility also performed at a high level in the area of inspections. It received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our best grades in that category with a grade of B+. These inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies are not something to panic about.

Our last area is long-term care, in which we gave this nursing home a C in that category. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary goal is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. After considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 99.07407 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is better than the average nursing home. Lastly, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.