South County Nursing Home

We awarded this facility an A for our long-term care score. This score is much more impressive than the facility's overall score. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in this category it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia tragically can be a life or death illness for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a facility does not take any chances. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home also excelled in inspections, where it received an A. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

As it turns out, this facility only received a D for its short-term care rating, which is not a score to write home about. Our short-term care grade is typically used to measure a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation To have quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have better levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. In this nursing home's case, we found that it offers fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than a typical facility. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who returned home from this nursing home. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

The next area we rated was nursing. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F for this category, which is a bottom of the barrel grade. This is obviously a major disappointment. Our nursing score considers a number of factors. The most heavily weighted variable is the quantity of hours nurses spent with residents. This facility provided a meager 0.1 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This statistic is quite a bit below average. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in calculating our nursing scores. This facility fared well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these metrics to be indicators of the quality of nursing care.