Safire Rehabilitation of Southtown

The main reason this facility received a decent overall score is its impeccable health inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our higher grades in that area, with an A-. This is a notably better score than the facility's overall score, which was decent but certainly not elite. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite insignificant. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

Another one of this facility's higher category scores came in the area of long-term care. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B. When nursing homes receive this type of grade in this category it is typically a good sign for patient care and indicates that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses aids. After we finished looking at the quantity of nursing care, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 99.75186 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly can be a life or death illness for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.04 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home's next highest area was short-term care. In that category, we awarded this facility a grade of B-. In the category of short-term care, we seek to assess measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We assess a nursing home's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and various therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last datapoint we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that just 4.6 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is actually below average.

The next area we looked at is nursing, is this facility's worst category. We gave this nursing home a D in this area. This was one of the few weak points of a quality profile. Nursing scores are based largely on levels of nurse staffing. This facility offered just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. In addition to its below average nursing hour totals, this nursing home also received suboptimal marks in several of the quality-based measures we considered in determining our nursing ratings. We found that more of this facility's patients suffered falls leading to major injury. We believe that many falls could likely be prevented with better nursing care. This metric contributed to this place receiving a poor nursing rating.