Riverside Heights Healthcare Center

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this facility also received an A+ long-term care grade. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility has received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A- in this category. Our inspection ratings account for a host of factors found on a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with better scores in this category generally have few severe deficiencies. This facility received 10 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to be an immediate risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A-. We looked at the qualifications of nurses at the facility, in addition to the quantity of hours those nurses worked with patients, in computing our grade in this area. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The last category we analyzed was this nursing home's weakest area. However, even in its weakest link we still gave it an acceptable grade of B- in our short-term care category. Short-term care grades are often used to assess a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to have higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. It does not appear that this nursing home submitted information on registered nurse or physical therapist staffing. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was actually quite a bit below average.