Life Care Center of South Hill

In addition to being a first rate facility overall, this nursing home also excelled in our short-term care rating, where it earned an impressive grade of A. Few facilities fared better in this area. In calculating these short-term care scores, we analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The objective is to devise a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final item we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 5.6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing score. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A. Our nursing rating is based on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of skill of the nurses and the number of hours spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.5 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 in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Another impressive feature of this facility is its inspection grade. In that category, we awarded this nursing home an A. These inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This place received 8 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies to be an immediate threat to patient health or safety. A few minor dings are not necessarily the end of the world.

The final category we assessed was long-term care, in which this facility was awarded a B. Believe it or not, this is this nursing home's worst category. A nursing home is doing something right when their worst score still is better than most facilities. If you are seeking anything other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care ratings. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate this place's vaccination data. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.