St. Pauls Health Care Center

St. Pauls Health Care Center is located in the large metropolitan area of San Diego, California which has a population of 1,241,364 people. This turns out to be a decent facility, with an overall grade of B-. The nursing homes in San Diego received a city grade of B+ so this isn't the only reliable option in the city. We were also pleased to discover that this place was consistent in all four of the major categories we assessed. Additional information about its category grades can be found below.

The primary reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it received an excellent inspection grade. In fact, its inspection grade was far superior to its overall grade. In the inspections category, we gave it an A. Our inspection ratings are tied to many items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

This nursing home's long-term care score turns out to be one of its respectable features. The facility received a grade of B- in this category. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. After considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 90.97745 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which happens to be a bit lower than we expected but still a decent figure. Unfortunately, its hospitalization rate was also below average. We found that this place had 2.27 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Although this figure is quite a bit higher than the national average, this statistic can be skewed for some facilities due to the medical complexity of patients

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home in any area came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of B-. There are a host of criteria included in this category. Most of these subcategories relate to nurse staffing. This facility provided 3.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in some quality-focused statistics. Specifically, we look at the percent of residents who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these statistics as reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

Our last category is short-term care, in which we gave this nursing home a grade of B- in that category. In computing our short-term care scores, we size up the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. This score is generally a fair assessment of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. When we looked at this facility's physical therapist hours, we found it offered more hours of physical therapy per day to its residents than most nursing homes. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients that returned home from this nursing home. We found that 43.9 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was actually below the national average.