South Shore Care Center

In addition to receiving a great overall score, this facility also received an elite nursing rating. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with an A. There are a host of subcategories included in this grade. Most of the factors are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This facility was given an impressive long-term care grade as well. We awarded it one of our better grades in that area with a score of B+. Nursing homes that receive this kind of grade in long-term care tend to provide consistent around the clock care to make sure patients are well cared for. One of the criteria we considered after nurse's aid hours is vaccines. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 91.30435 percent of its residents. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This nursing home is also strong in the area of short-term care, where it was awarded a grade of B. It outpaced most nursing homes in this area. In computing our short-term care ratings, we look at the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This area is often a meaningful assessment of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients that ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that 5.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

In the final category we assessed, this nursing home received a decent score in the area of inspections as well. In fact, we gave it a B- for that category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be relatively insignificant. This facility received 8 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to resident health or safety. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.