The Cardinal at North Hills

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are quite insignificant. Although this place had some deficiencies on its report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

To complement its impressive performance in other areas, we gave this nursing home a score of A for its short-term care score. Short-term care grades are typically used to judge a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to have quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally must provide better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. It does not appear that this facility submitted registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return home from this facility. We found that 6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This nursing home also was strong in the category of long-term care, where it received a grade of A-. Not many facilities received a better grade in this area. Facilities that excel in this category typically provide residents with better supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 96.875 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The last area we analyzed was nursing. In that category, we awarded this facility a solid grade of B-. This turned out to be this facility's weakest area. In computing our nursing ratings, we factor in both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of those nurses. This place provides only 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a somewhat concerning figure as it is well below the national average. Lastly, we like to look at quality-based statistics, such as the percentage of patients who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. These statistics are measures of the quality of nursing care.