River's Bend Retirement Community

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this place an A+ for the area of inspections. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some end up being quite minor. 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.

Adding to this facility's list of accomplishments, it also was awarded a very favorable long-term care score. We awarded them a dominant grade of A- in this category. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it typically means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. On top of considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia tragically can be a deadly illness for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home does not roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of B-. This wasn't quite as good as some of its other scores, but a grade in this range is not the end of the world. There are numerous datapoints within this grade. Most of these criteria are tied to the quantity of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility surprisingly fared better in some of the quality measures we assessed. In fact, it scored well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.

The last area we assessed was short-term care, which ended up being this facility's least impressive category. We awarded this facility a D in this category. Of course, this grade hurt the nursing home's overall grade to a certain degree. Our short-term care grades are considered to be more important for patients requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically requires additional highly-skilled nursing services. This means not just nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other types of therapy. We found that this facility was subpar in several staffing metrics we looked at. It provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most other facilities. The last measure we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 3.7 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics sunk this nursing home's short-term care score.