South County Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

This facility's overall grade was propped up by the fact that it has earned favorable government inspections in recent years. We gave them a strong score in this area, with a B+. This is a notably better grade than the facility's overall grade. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this category typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. This proved to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this facility an B. Our nursing rating considers a number of subcategories. The most important one is the amount of time nurses spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility Rhode Island in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of moving a patient even once per day.

This facility also received a positive score in our long-term care category. We awarded this nursing home an above average grade of B in this category. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 90.72581 percent of its patients, which is slightly less than we were hoping for. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Our next area is short-term care, where we gave this nursing home a grade of C in that area. In our short-term care category, we try to create a meaningful barometer for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we analyze a facility's level of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 4.7 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.