Life Care Center of Sullivan

While this nursing home's overall grade was decent, it really excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our best scores. Inspection grades are tied to several items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this area have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This means the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

We also awarded this facility a favorable score in short-term care. This facility received a B+ in this category, which turns out to be one of our more favorable grades. Our short-term care grades are based in part on the nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a broad scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other forms of therapy. It does not appear that this facility provided information about its staffing of registered nurses or physical therapists. The final metric we looked at in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that 5.6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

This nursing home's second lowest score is long-term care, where it received a grade of just D in that category. This is a relatively poor score. If you are looking for services other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care ratings. One of the statistics we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccines. Fortunately, this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Surprisingly, this place also keeps its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.

The last area we assessed is nursing, which turned out to be this facility's weakest area. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F in this category, which is obviously a major disappointment. There are a variety of subcategories included in this area. Most of these factors relate to staffing levels. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This number is quite a bit below the national average. On top of rating below average in nursing hours per resident, this nursing home also had poor marks in the quality-based metrics we looked at in determining our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of patients experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This place was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in both of these metrics. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. These scores pulled down this nursing home's nursing rating quite a bit.