South Mountain Post Acute

This facility received a strong overall score as described above, but we especially wanted to emphasize its nearly flawless inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A+ in this category. Arguably the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. 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. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home received impressive marks in the category of long-term care as well. As a result, we gave it one of our most dominant scores in that area with a area of A-. Facilities that excel in long-term care tend to provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is far higher than most nursing homes. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The next category we analyzed is short-term care. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a B-. In the area of short-term care, we attempt to assess measures of a facility's rehabilitation. We look at a nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. Unfortunately, we were not able to find information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The last datapoint we looked at in this category is the number of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 5.2 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Switching gears to our next category, we awarded this facility a D for our nursing category. This was the nursing home's worst category rating. Unfortunately, this category pulled down the nursing home's overall profile a bit. We assessed the skill-level of nurses employed by the nursing home, as well as the number of hours the nurses worked with patients, in determining our rating in this area. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Although this place did not excel in the area of nursing hours, it actually surprised us in some of the quality-based assessments in the nursing category, such as avoiding major falls. This facility was better than average in this statistic, which was one redeeming quality we found in this category.