Southern Springs Healthcare Facility

On top of performing well overall, this facility also earned nearly flawless government inspections. Therefore, it received one of our highest grades in that area with an A+. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This nursing home received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent threat to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home was awarded high grades in the category of long-term care as well. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with a area of A-. If you are looking for anything other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care grades. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 68.13187 percent of its patients. This is somewhat lower than we expected but still a reasonably acceptable figure. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B+. There are a host of criteria included in this category. Most of these factors relate to nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of turning a patient even once per day.

This nursing home's weakest area is short-term care, which is the last category we scored. In this area, we gave this nursing home a grade of D. We would like to to point out this possible weak link, but you shouldn't dwell on one category either. In our short-term care assessment, we seek to create a sound measure for rehabilitation. In doing so, we look at a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. It looks like this place was below average in multiple staffing areas we assessed. It supplied fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most facilities. Finally, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. This definitely was not a strength for this facility. We found that just 4 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, about half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.