August Healthcare at Richmond

On top of receiving a strong overall score, this facility also earned an elite long-term care rating. We awarded it one of our better scores in that area, with an impressive grade of A. For prospective patients seeking a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. In addition to looking at the amount 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 91.17647 percent of its residents. This is somewhat less than we expected but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Among this facility's other strengths is its elite nursing grade. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of A-. We scrutinized the skill-level of nurses employed by the nursing home, as well as the quantity of hours the nurses spent with patients, in computing our score in this category. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Another area of strength for this nursing home is in the area of inspections. In fact, inspections proved to be one of its best categories. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively minor. We were not able to find information on deficiency's for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The last area we rated was short-term care. We gave this facility a decent grade in that category, with a B-. While this isn't on par with some of this nursing home's other scores, it is still not a terrible score. In determining our short-term care grades, we scrutinize the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This area is generally a useful measure of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final statistic we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is below average.