River Place Nursing Center

In addition to being an elite nursing home overall, this facility also performed well in our inspections category, where it earned an A+. Few facilities fared as well in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are relatively minor. Unfortunately, it does not appear that we have deficiency counts for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. In that category, we awarded this facility an A-. We weighed the levels of nurses working for the nursing home, as well as the quantity of hours those nurses spent with patients, in determining our score in this area. This facility provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This nursing home also was given a strong long-term care grade. In fact, this is this nursing home's third strongest category score. In that area, we awarded this facility a score of A-. Facilities that do well in this category typically provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 99.44444 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The next category we assessed was short-term care, where this facility received a C. This proved to be this facility's least impressive area. This is nevertheless a middle of the pack score. In crafting our short-term care scores, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our goal is to devise a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents that ultimately returned home from this facility. We found that 3.5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well below the national average.