River's Bend Retirement Community

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. These inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also was awarded a fine short-term care score. Indeed, this is its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to gauge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To have quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature higher levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This nursing home also performed well in the area of long-term care, where we gave it a grade of A-. Only a select group of facilities received a better grade in this category. Facilities that receive this kind of grade in this category typically provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure residents are well cared for. After we finished assessing the volume of nursing care, we then looked at the facility's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly can be a life threatening health condition for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility doesn't take any chances. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The next category we rated is nursing. This facility was awarded an impressive nursing score this year, with a grade of B. Even though this wasn't as elite as several of its other scores, this remains one of our more impressive grades in this area. Our nursing score focuses on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of licensure of the nurses and the number of hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these statistics as reliable measures of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.