Spring Hills Post Acute Livingston

In addition to being a strong nursing home overall, it also received A+ government inspections in recent years. Its inspections were nearly perfect. Inspection scores account for a host of factors found on a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category usually have very few severe deficiencies. This place was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies an immediate threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our short-term care category. In fact, we awarded it a score of A for that category. Short-term care grades are often employed to gauge a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to offer good rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents who eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 5.7 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Turning our next area, we gave this nursing home a grade of A for our long-term care rating. This is a dominant grade. Facilities that excel in long-term care typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is often a dangerous ailment for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In the final category we rated, this nursing home was awarded a very strong grade of A- in our nursing category. With this score, the facility finished off a straight A profile. When determining our nursing scores, we factor in both nursing hours and the training levels of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these metrics as predictive measures of the caliber of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.