Southwestern Virginia Mental Health Institute

On top of being a first rate nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A+. Few places performed this well in this area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection grades. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be relatively insignificant. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility excelled in our nursing rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Our nursing score is largely based on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures 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 generally be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a system of turning a patient more often.

Moving on our next area, we awarded this facility a score of A for its long-term care score. This is a very strong rating. For prospective patients in need of a permanent residence rather than rehabilitation, long-term care grades are an important measure. Once we finished looking at the volume of nursing care, we turned to the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 70 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

In the last category, we gave this facility a grade of A+ for its short-term care grade. This finished off a first-rate profile. Short-term care ratings are important for residents in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates higher levels of skilled nursing. This means a wide spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.