St Therese of Woodbury

St Therese of Woodbury is a small non-profit nursing home located in Saint Paul, Minnesota. It looks like this nursing home is among the highest-rated facilities we assessed. A grade of this caliber requires superb scores across the board. Saint Paul has a variety of nursing homes, however, it is doubtful you will need to visit too many others. This one looks like a first class option. The best part of this nursing home's profile was is its short-term care rating. We discuss short-term care in the next paragraph.

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home received an A+ in the area of short-term care. With our short-term care rating, we seek to create a meaningful barometer for rehabilitation services. In this process, we look at a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Remarkably, this place provides roughly 1.5 times as many hours of services from physical therapists and registered nurses than most facilities we looked at. This is typically an excellent sign. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of nursing homes in the nation in this area with 71.2 percent of its patients returning home. This is a significantly higher rate than most nursing homes.

The next category we looked at was inspections, where this facility also received an A+ grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors didn't 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 facility also was given a strong long-term care grade. This actually ended up being this facility's third best category score. In that category, we gave this facility a grade of A-. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is often a life or death ailment for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility doesn't take any chances. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The last area we assessed turned out to be this facility's weakest area. Nevertheless, even its worst category would be a strength for most nursing homes. In fact, we gave it a favorable grade of B in nursing. We scrutinized the levels of nurses employed by the facility, in addition to the quantity of hours those nurses spent with patients, in computing our score in this category. This facility provided 3.9 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. Approximately a quarter of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are among the most skilled levels of nurses. Both are impressive figures, which typically correlates with higher quality care. Lastly, we also looked at nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these areas as good measures of the caliber of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.