River Oaks Care Center

On top of being a quality nursing home overall, this place also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A+. Not many nursing homes performed better in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection scores. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively insignificant. This facility was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This means that the inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to resident safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it was given a favorable long-term care score. In fact, long-term care ended up being its second most impressive category score. In that area, we gave this nursing home a grade of A-. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 99.25094 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. This wasn't quite on par with some of its other category grades mentioned above. In determining a nursing home's nursing grade, we look at the quantity of hours nurses are seeing residents and the skill levels of the nurses. This nursing home provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This figure is significantly below the national average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home fared better in some of the quality measures we assessed. It scored well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.

This nursing home's least impressive category was short-term care, which is the final category we assessed. In this area, we gave this facility a grade of just D. Short-term care grades are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of skilled nursing services. This means a broad scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. In this nursing home's case, we found that it provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than a typical facility. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.