River Ridge Center

To pair with its strong overall score, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for inspections. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category. Our nursing grade is largely tied to a nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home Maine in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of turning a patient more often.

This nursing home also excelled in the area of short-term care, where it received a grade of A-. Only a select group of facilities received a better grade in this category. Our short-term care grade is typically employed to assess a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation In order to provide highly scored rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide higher levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients who who were able to eventually return home from this facility. We found that 5.2 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

The final area we analyzed was long-term care. We gave this nursing home one of our more favorable scores in this area, with a grade of B. While this is not as favorable as several of this nursing home's other grades, it is nevertheless a positive score. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. After assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 73.333336 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which happens to be slightly less than we anticipated but still a decent percentage. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.