Southside Care Center

This nursing home's best category grade came in the category of short-term care. In that category, we awarded this facility a B+. Short-term care ratings are crucial for residents needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes a broad range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. It does not look like this facility provided data regarding its registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Inspections is another area where this nursing home excelled. We awarded this facility an B+ for our inspections category. This is far more impressive than its overall grade. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this category typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. A couple minor deficiencies are not something to panic about.

In addition, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B in our nursing category. This is one of our better grades. Our nursing rating focuses on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of skill of those nurses as well as the amount of time spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this nursing home 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 many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a policy of turning patients more frequently.

The last area we assessed is long-term care. We awarded this facility a grade of D for our long-term care category, leaving this as its least impressive grade. In a long-term care environment, the primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents. Surprisingly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. Sadly, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.