South County Nursing Home

In addition to being a quality facility overall, this facility really excelled in long-term care, where it earned an A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Nursing homes that receive this kind of grade in this category tend to provide consistent around the clock care to ensure patients are kept in good health. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents healthy. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility also excelled in inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A- for that category. Arguably the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facilities second worse grade is short-term care. We awarded it a D in this category. This is not a very good grade in this category. Short-term care scores are vital for prospective residents looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires additional highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a wide range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, we discovered that this facility provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most other facilities. The last datapoint we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home 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 subpar metrics doomed this nursing home's short-term care score.

The next category we rated was nursing. We gave this nursing home a grade of D in our nursing category, leaving this as its least impressive grade. Our nursing score consists of many data points, but the most important one is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility offered a meager 0.1 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is well below average. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing grades. This place performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these metrics to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care.