South Dennis Healthcare

South Dennis Healthcare is located in South Dennis, Massachusetts. With an overall score of C, this looks like a decent nursing home. Based on our assessment, there are certainly much worse facilities out there. The best part of this place's profile was is its short-term care rating. We discuss short-term care in the next section.

This nursing home really excelled in the category of short-term care, where it earned an impressive grade of A. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. If it wasn't for this area, this facility's overall score would have been much worse. In our short-term care category, we attempt to create a fair gauge for rehabilitation. In this process, we look at the nursing home's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. When we looked at this facility's physical therapist hours, we found it offered more hours of physical therapy per day to its residents than most nursing homes. The last item we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients that who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. We found that it fared as well as just about any facility in Massachusetts in this area with 67.8 percent of its patients returning home.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. This proved to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this facility an B. We looked at the licensure of nurses employed by the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of hours those nurses worked with residents, in computing our grade in this area. This nursing home averages 3.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these datapoints as good measures of the caliber of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

The next area we graded is long-term care, where this nursing home was awarded a C in this category. If you are looking for services other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at long-term care ratings. After assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. We were somewhat surprised to discover that this nursing home vaccinated just 48.76543 percent of its patients for pneumonia. On a more positive note, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The final category we looked at was inspections. Unfortunately, this nursing home didn't receive glowing inspections in recent years. We had to give it an F in this category. Since this data is compiled by independent government inspectors, we tend to heavily weight a poor performance in this category. This really pulled down this facility's overall grade. We would advise paying close attention to any deficiencies on a facility's inspection reports when it receives this bad of an inspection score. We suggest you scrutinize the level of severity of the deficiencies. This facility was assessed 6 deficiencies by CMS. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that indicate that they created a threat to patient safety or health. Lastly, we would like to point out that this facility received significant government fines exceeding $50,000. This usually indicates that government inspectors became fed up after several years of bad health inspections.