St. Pauls Health Care Center

On top of receiving a strong overall grade, this facility performed well in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our highest scores. We assessed the qualifications of nurses at the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of time the nurses were with residents, in computing our rating in this category. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

In addition, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

In addition, this nursing home also was awarded favorable long-term care grades this year. Indeed, we gave them one of our more favorable scores in that area, with a grade of B. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. After looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is significantly higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The final area we looked at was short-term care. We gave this facility an acceptable grade in this category, with a B-. While this is not as high as many of this nursing home's other grades, it is still nothing to be ashamed of. Short-term care grades are typically employed to gauge a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to have highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to feature better levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 3.7 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well below the national average.