River Ridge Center

River Ridge Center is one of just a few available facilities in Kennebunk, Maine. We awarded this nursing home an A- overall grade, ranking it in the top third of all facilities in the United States. You flat out can not do any better than this place. This facility's strong profile was highlighted by its short-term care score, which is addressed in the next paragraph.

To pair with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. In the category of short-term care, we strive to qualify indicators of a facility's rehabilitation services. We look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. One of this nursing home's strengths is registered nurse hours. We found that it offers more care from registered nurses to its residents than most facilities. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. It performed as well as just about any nursing home in the country in this area with 61.2 percent of its residents returning home. Most nursing homes are below 50 percent in this area.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, this turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. There are quite a few datapoints within this grade. Most of these factors are tied to staffing levels. This nursing home boasts a really impressive 5.1 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, of which a significant percentage of those hours were provided by registered nurses. This is one of the more highly trained levels of nurses. In addition to providing impressive levels of care, this place was also above average in several of the major quality measures we assessed in this category. It performed well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.

We awarded this facility an A for our inspections rating. Inspection grades weigh several factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better scores in this area usually have very few severe deficiencies. This nursing home was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies to pose an immediate threat to patient safety or health. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

This nursing home's weakest area was long-term care, which is the final category we assessed. We gave it an F for this area. In spite of multiple favorable grades in other categories, this grade is nevertheless somewhat concerning so we wanted to point it out. In the category of long-term care, we focus on the quantity of services offered by a facility, rather than more medically-intensive services. In addition to providing respectable levels of nurse staffing, this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 99.481865 percent of its patients. These marks were clearly more respectable than a few of its other data points in this category. Surprisingly, this facility also keeps its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.46 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.