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 6.7 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Adding to its impressive category scores, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A. Our inspection grades weigh several factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher grades in this category tend to have very few of these severe deficiencies. This place was hit with 8 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered severe. This means that CMS didn't deem any of these deficiencies to create an immediate risk to resident health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. When computing our nursing ratings, we factor in both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the training levels of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The final area we scored was long-term care, where this nursing home received a B. Even though this is its lowest category rating, this is still an impressive rating. For prospective patients looking for a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. One of the data points we considered on top of nurse's aid hours was vaccines. It does not appear that this facility provided data regarding vaccinations. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.