Southern Ocean Medical Center

To pair with its strong overall score, we gave this facility an A+ for our inspection category. Inspection grades are based on several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this area have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that we have deficiency data for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Another reason we graded this facility so highly is that it was awarded an A+ short-term care score. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. In the area of short-term care, we endeavor to evaluate measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We look at a nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. We were pleased to find that this nursing home employs both registered nurses and physical therapists. The same can't be said for all nursing homes. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients that were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 7.2 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This nursing home also received an A+ nursing grade, making it one of the few nursing homes to receive multiple A+ category grades. Nursing grades are primarily associated with the nursing home's nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.8 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 typically be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

In the last area, we gave this facility an A+ for our long-term care grade. This finished off a very strong profile. If you are looking for services other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at long-term care ratings. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We weren't able to find information about this nursing home's vaccination rates. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.