St. Mary's Hospital

St. Mary's Hospital is a very-small hospital-based facility located in Huntington, West Virginia. This facility is among the most impressive facilities we looked at. Receiving an A+ in our grading scheme requires superb scores across the board. We were so impressed with this facility that we ranked it as one of the top three nursing homes in West Virginia. Headlining this nursing home's exemplary profile is its short-term care grade, which you can find in the next section.

On top of performing well in its overall grade, this facility received high marks for short-term care as well. As a result, it received our highest grade in that category with a score of A+. Our short-term care ratings are believed to be more critical for those requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally requires additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not only nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other types of therapy. This place excelled at the highest level in two key staffing areas we assessed. In fact, it supplied about 50% more care from registered nurses and physical therapists than the typical facility. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of nursing homes in this area with 72.6 percent of its residents returning home. This is a significantly higher rate than most facilities.

This nursing home also received an A+ nursing grade, making it one of the few nursing homes to receive multiple A+ category grades. Our nursing score looks at the facility's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of licensure of those nurses as well as the amount of time spent with patients. This nursing home boasts a really impressive 8 hours of nursing care per resident daily, of which a significant percentage of those hours were provided by registered nurses. This is one of the most highly highly trained levels of nurses. In addition to offering impressive levels of nursing care, this place also excelled in the quality-based metrics we assessed. It performed as well as any nursing home in West Virginia in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.

The third category we assessed is long-term care. This nursing home also was awarded an A+ long-term care grade, rendering it one of the few nursing homes to be given more than one A+ category scores. Facilities that receive this kind of grade in long-term care tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to ensure patients are well cared for. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination record. We weren't able to find information about this nursing home's vaccination rates. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Adding to its amazing profile, this facility has also earned near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. This wrapped up a perfect report card for this facility. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection scores. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite insignificant. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.