South Dennis Healthcare

The main reason this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an elite nursing grade. In fact, we gave this facility a grade of A-. There are several criteria within this area. Most of the criteria are tied to the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a system of moving residents at least once a day.

Additionally, we awarded this nursing home a B+ in our long-term care category. This is one of our better grades. For prospective residents in need of a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care grades are very important. After considering the quantity of care provided by nurses, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 40.32258 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In addition, we gave this nursing home a B in our short-term care category. This is one of our higher grades. Our short-term care grade is generally used to assess a nursing home's rehabilitation services In order to offer highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally must provide better levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final metric we assessed in this area is the number of patients that eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that 4.6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Moving on our last category of inspections, this facility received an F here. This score was detrimental to this nursing home's overall score. When a place has this bad of an inspection score, you should look for severe deficiencies on its inspection report. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to resident safety. This particular facility was assessed 6 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only positive thing we found is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they caused a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, we need to draw your attention to the fact that this place was assessed significant government fines recently amounting to over $100,000. This typically indicates that a bad performance spanned multiple years.