Southern Hills Specialty Care

The primary reason this nursing home received a decent overall grade is its excellent health inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with an A. This is a much better score than the place's overall score, which was decent but certainly not elite. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this category most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also performed favorably in the category of long-term care, with a superb score of A- in this category. When facilities receive this type of score in this category it is typically a good sign for patient care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses aids. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 99.0566 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents out of the hospital. 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 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of C in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. The nursing grade weighs quite a few components, however, the most important consideration is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day, which is not an impressive total. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home surprisingly fared better in some of the quality measures we looked at. It performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.

The last area we rated is short-term care, which is this nursing home's weakest area. We gave this facility a grade of D in that area. Sadly, this category pulled down the facility's overall profile to some degree. In calculating these short-term care ratings, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The goal is to devise a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provides fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most nursing homes. The last datapoint we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 5.6 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, this was quite a bit below average.