River Hills Health and Rehabilitation Center

This nursing home's overall score was bolstered by the fact that it has received favorable inspections in recent years. We gave them a strong score in this category, with a grade of B+. This is a notably better score than the facility's overall grade. Our inspection ratings are based on many datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this area tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This means that CMS did not consider 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.

Additionally, we also wanted to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received favorable short-term care marks this year. We gave them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. This turned out to be the facility's second best grade. Our short-term care grade is often employed to measure a facility's rehabilitation services. To offer quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature higher levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. Unfortunately, we weren't able to find information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Finally, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.7 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

We also awarded this nursing home a respectable score in the area of long-term care, with a grade of B-. Long-term care grades assess a nursing home's assistance with daily living instead of the skilled therapy or medical services that are critical to a skilled nursing facility. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 93.30986 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is somewhat below what we were hoping for but still a decent figure. On a more positive note, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Moving on to the next area, this nursing home really didn't fare well. With a very poor grade of F in nursing, this is this nursing home's worst category. There are a host of data points within this area. Many of the data points relate to nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. To pair with its below average totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this facility had really bad marks in many of the quality-based metrics we looked at in calculating our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of patients having falls leading to serious injury. This nursing home was at more than 1.5 times the national average in this statistic. This is concerning in light of the fact that many falls could be prevented with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the nursing home's fate of earning a poor nursing rating.