St Margaret Hall

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility has received near flawless inspections recently. We gave them an A+ in this category. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this area typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In addition, this facility received high marks in the area of long-term care. Consequently, it was given one of our best scores in that category with a score of A+. Facilities that excel in long-term care typically provide patients with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. After considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is much higher than most nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. When calculating a nursing home's nursing score, we consider the number of hours nurses spend with patients and the level of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The last category we scored is short-term care. We gave this nursing home an acceptable grade in this area, with a grade of B-. Although this wasn't on par with some of this facility's other scores, it is still not a major area of concern. Our short-term care ratings are presumably most important for people needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes not only nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 3.8 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.