Flatrock River Lodge

One of the reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it earned an impressive inspection rating. In fact, inspections turned out to be its best category grade. In this area, we gave this facility an A. Inspection grades are tied to many datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this category tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' scale. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we gave this nursing home an B+. Our nursing grade is primarily based on a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

In addition, this nursing home also received favorable short-term care scores this year. In fact, we gave it one of our stronger grades in that category, with a grade of B+. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to score a facility's rehabilitation services To provide highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.3 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

The next category we scored is long-term care. Unfortunately, we gave it an F for this category, which is an abysmal score. We would not necessarily disregard a facility because of a single terrible category though. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids, as well as the levels of routine medical care available. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. We were a bit alarmed this nursing home administered the vaccine to a relatively low 87.21805 percent of its residents. Surprisingly, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than many nursing homes. This is its best score in this category.