Southland Health Care Center

In addition to receiving a strong overall grade, this facility also received an elite long-term care grade. We awarded it one of our higher scores in that category, with an A+. When nursing homes receive this type of score in this category it is usually a good sign for patient care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 96.01594 percent of its residents, which is better than the majority of nursing homes. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility also performed well in inspections, which is based on the facility's government inspections. We awarded it an A- for that category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection scores. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively minor. This place was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that the inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies an immediate threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. While this wasn't quite as good as some of its other category grades, this isn't a bad score either. When calculating a facility's nursing grade, we look at the amount of time nurses commit to patients and the skill levels of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home excelled in some of the quality measures we assessed. In fact, it performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.

The final area we analyzed is short-term care, which was this nursing home's least impressive area. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F for this category, which is certainly a bit of a concern. With our short-term care category, we endeavor to create a valuable measure for rehabilitation. In this process, we analyze a nursing home's level of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. In this nursing home's case, we found that it provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This was not a strength for this facility. We found that just 3.6 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.