St Pauls Towers

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it earned an A+ in short-term care. This is as good as it gets in this category. In determining our short-term care grades, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our goal is to formulate a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final statistic we considered in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We found that 6.8 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. This proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an A. There are many factors included in this category. Many of these criteria are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Another impressive feature of this nursing home is its inspection score. In that category, we awarded this facility an impressive grade of A. Our inspection scores are based on many pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This nursing home received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This indicates that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies an immediate threat to resident health or safety. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

The final category we rated is long-term care, where this facility received a B. Even though this proved to be its weakest category rating, this is still a quality grade. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in this category it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is significantly higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. 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 only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.