River Ridge Living Center

Although we did not rate this nursing home favorably overall, we want to draw your attention to its excellent health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A- in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection grades. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are quite minor. While this place had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the inspectors 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 are not the end of the world.

This facilities next best category was long-term care. We gave it a C in this area. This is basically a middle of the pack score in this area. Our long-term care ratings are based on a nursing home's amount of nursing services. This means a broad range of personal care services, ranging from assistance with activities of daily living to routine healthcare services. Once we finished looking at the amount of nursing care, we turned to the facility's vaccination records. We were optimistic to find that this nursing home vaccinates 99.41003 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Lastly, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

We awarded this nursing home just a D for our short-term care score. This is not an impressive grade. In determining our short-term care scores, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our objective is to devise a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Given its score in this area, we were not stunned to discover that this nursing home was well below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its residents based on the figures we assessed. Frankly, this was what we expected here. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who were able to return home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 3.9 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

The next area we graded is nursing. We gave it an abysmal F for this category, which is a bottom of the barrel grade. Our nursing grade includes several data points. The most important one is the amount of time nurses spend with patients. This place provided only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is well below average. Unfortunately, this nursing home also had abysmal marks in some of the quality-based metrics to go along with its low nursing hour totals. We looked at the percentage of patients experiencing pressure ulcers and we were quite disappointed. This facility was at roughly 1.5 times the national average in this area.