River City Center

While this facility's overall grade was not bad, it really excelled in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our best scores. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This nursing home was assessed 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to be an imminent threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also was awarded an impressive score in our long-term care category. We awarded this nursing home an above average grade of B+ in this area. When facilities receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 96.40151 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facilities next most favorable area was short-term care. We gave it a B- in this area. This is basically a middle of the road score in this category. In the area of short-term care, we seek to evaluate measures of a facility's rehabilitation services. We assess a facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final statistic we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 4.7 percent of this facility's patients returned home. This figure was below average.

The next area we analyzed is nursing. For that category, we gave this facility a B-. Nursing scores are largely tied to the nursing home's nurse staffing. This place provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is a lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, our nursing ratings also consider some quality-focused metrics. We like to look at the percent of patients who suffered pressure ulcers and major falls. Sometimes these statistics are decent measures of the quality of nursing care, since better care tends to reduce these problems.