Sunny Ridge

On top of earning a great overall grade, this facility also earned an excellent short-term care grade, with an A. Our short-term care scores are critical for patients looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a broad range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that 6.7 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received a superb grade of A in our long-term care area. Nursing homes that do well in this category typically provide residents with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. Once we finished looking at the amount of nursing care, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is often a life threatening ailment for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Moving on to another of this facility's strengths, it also earned a very impressive inspection grade. In that category, we gave this facility an impressive grade of B+. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The next area we assessed was nursing, where this nursing home was awarded a B. Even though this wound up being its worst category rating, this is nevertheless an above average grade. In computing a nursing home's nursing grade, we look at the quantity of hours nurses spend with patients as well as the level of skill of those nurses. This facility provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.