Southwood at Norwell Nursing Center

To go along with its strong overall score, this facility earned a grade of B+ for its inspections grade. This is an above average score in this area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection scores. One of those factors is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively insignificant. This particular nursing home received 5 deficiencies on its inspection report. Overall, this is still a good inspection report, but we'd always recommend looking into any deficiencies you find troubling.

An additional quality feature for this facility is that it was awarded an above average long-term care score. Indeed, this ended up being its second best category score. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a B+. When nursing homes receive this type of grade in this category it is usually a good sign for patient care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses and aids. One of the factors we considered after nursing hours was vaccinations. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 99.73545 percent of its residents. This is a great way to avoid unnecessary deaths for the aged 65 and up population. Clearly, this nursing home 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 one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

In addition, this facility also received favorable nursing grades this year. In fact, we awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. There are several datapoints included in this category. Most of the subcategories reflect nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a policy of moving a patient more frequently.

The last category we rated was short-term care. We gave this facility a grade of B- in this category. In the area of short-term care, we seek to qualify indicators of a facility's rehabilitation. We look at a nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Unfortunately, we weren't able to track down information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 4.8 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well below average.