Senath South Health Care Center

While this place's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually didn't perform terribly in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a B- for that category, which is one of our better scores. Our inspection scores weigh several factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, CMS cited this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. Hopefully, its performance improves in the future, but until then we simply can't recommend this facility.

This facility's second most respectable category was long-term care, but it still received just a D in that area. This still happens to be a well below average grade. Facilities that do not fare well in this category typically are not as well-staffed and are lagging in some of the areas of routine medical care we looked at. One of the factors we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccines. We were a bit alarmed this facility administered the pneumonia vaccination to just 11.775703 percent of its residents. We were also disappointed with the nursing home's hospitalization rate. We found that this nursing home had 2.88 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is nearly double the national average.

Tragically, this facility received an F for its short-term care score. In computing these short-term care scores, we analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to devise a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. As you might expect, we discovered that this nursing home provides significantly less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than a typical nursing home. The last measure we looked at in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics sunk this facility's short-term care score.

The next category we graded was nursing. Sadly, it received a lowly F in this area, which is a very poor grade. When determining a facility's nursing grade, we consider the number of hours nurses are with patients and the level of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home offered just 2 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Unfortunately, this nursing home also had terrible scores in some of the quality-based measures to pair with its low nursing hour totals. We looked at the percentage of residents suffering pressure ulcers and we were quite disappointed. This nursing home was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in this metric. This is a bad sign when you consider that many pressure ulcers could be avoided with better nursing care. This statistic helped pull down this nursing home's nursing grade quite a bit.