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. Inspection scores are based on many items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this area have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Although this place had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its first-rate profile, this facility also was awarded a strong short-term care score, with a grade of A. With our short-term care rating, we attempt to create a fair measure for rehabilitation. In this process, we assess the nursing home's levels of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. One reason for this nursing home's favorable grade in this category is it offers more care from registered nurses than the typical facility. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients that who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. We found that it fared as well as just about any nursing home with 56.4 percent of its patients returning home.

We also wanted to point out the fact that this nursing home was awarded a high-end score of A in our long-term care area. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. In addition to providing elite levels of nursing care and other staffing, this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. This statistic is also far better than the average nursing home. This combination proved to be successful as this facility keeps its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The last area we rated is nursing, where this facility received a grade of A-. This rounded out a first-rate report card. Few facilities earned an A- or better in in each area we assessed. Our nursing rating includes several components, however, the primary consideration is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility provides an incredible 5.6 hours of nursing care per resident each day. Out of that total, many of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the most highly trained levels of nurses. On top of looking at levels of nursing care, we also looked at a few quality measures in determining our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these areas as reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.