Sandy Ridge Health and Rehabilitation

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This place was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies to be an immediate threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also performed well in the area of long-term care, where it received a score of A-. Few nursing homes received a better grade in this category. Nursing homes that receive this kind of grade in this category tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure residents are kept in good health. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 96.111115 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Turning the page to our third area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for its short-term care grade. This is a very strong grade. In computing our short-term care grades, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The objective is to devise a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last item we assessed in this category is the number of residents who ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that 5.6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

The next category we looked at proved to be this facility's poorest area. However, even in its worst category we still awarded it a decent grade of B- for nursing. Our nursing rating assesses a handful of factors, many of which are associated with nursing hours. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Finally, while this nursing home did not rank highly in terms of nursing hours, it performed much better in some of the quality measures we assessed. In terms of the percentage of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, this place performed better than the national average.