Signature Healthcare of South Louisville

Signature Healthcare of South Louisville is an average-sized facility in Louisville, Kentucky. With an overall score of B+, this nursing home should work for most prospective residents. In fact, this proved to be better than many of the nursing homes in Louisville. The best aspect of this nursing home's impressive profile was its inspection reports. Inspection grades are discussed in the next paragraph

This nursing home received a quality overall score as described above, but we especially want to emphasize its excellent health inspections in recent years. We gave it an A in this area. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

This facility fared well in the category of short-term care. As a result, we gave it a score of A- for that category, which happens to be one of our higher scores. Short-term care grades are based in part on a facility's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a wide scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. This place provides more services with registered nurses and physical therapists than most facilities we looked at. This is often an excellent sign. The final metric we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients that ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. It fared better than most nursing homes in this area with 54.5 percent of its residents returning home. With most facilities, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. Our nursing rating analyzes the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of licensure of the nurses as well as the number of hours spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 3.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The final category we scored is long-term care, where this facility received a C. This actually is this facility's least impressive category. This is nevertheless not a poor grade. Our long-term care ratings are important for people in need of personal care. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We were a bit bothered by the fact that this nursing home administered the vaccine to a relatively low 37.446808 percent of its residents. Nevertheless, this facility was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Although it had 2.09 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, its risk adjusted metric was better than most facilities since it had some more complicated patients.