Rehab at River's Edge

To go along with its relatively modest overall score, we gave this facility an A+ for its inspection grade. This grade is far more impressive than the facility's overall rating. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Another one of this facility's more impressive category grades was in the category of long-term care. In that category, we gave this facility a B+. For long-term care residents, the primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. One of the datapoints we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccinations. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 89.71963 percent of its residents. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, we were pleased to find facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home in any area came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of B-. We assessed the qualifications of nurses working for the facility, as well as the quantity of time those nurses worked with patients, in determining our rating in this category. This place provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a low total compared with most other nursing homes. Lastly, despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this place actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is generally a good indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place.

The next area we looked at was short-term care. It received an F for this area, which is a rock bottom grade. This is clearly a significant disappointment. In computing our short-term care grades, we scrutinize the facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This area is more often than not a useful assessment of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. In this place's case, it looks like it provided less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than a typical facility. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This wasn't a strength for this facility. We found that just 3.4 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.