St Paul Elder Services

To go along with a strong overall score, we gave this facility an A+ for our inspection category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some can be quite insignificant. While this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This high end facility also excelled in the category of short-term care, where we gave it a grade of A+. Only a small group of nursing homes fared better in this area. Our short-term care grades are based on the facility's quantity of highly-skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a vast spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, in addition to other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. When determining our nursing ratings, we assess both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of the nurses. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a policy of turning residents even once per day.

Turning to the next area, this facility was awarded a high-end long-term care score. In fact, we awarded it an A- in that category, rounding out a straight A profile. When facilities receive this type of score in long-term care it is a good sign for resident care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 99.68454 percent of its residents, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia tragically can be a life threatening condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't take any chances. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.