Touchmark on South Hill Nursing

On top of earning a great overall score, this nursing home received an A+ for short-term care. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to grade a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide highly scored rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must offer higher levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 7 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In that category, we awarded this nursing home an A. Our nursing category assesses several datapoints, most of which are tied to nursing hours. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a system of moving residents at least once a day.

This nursing home also performed at a high level in the category of inspections. In fact, it earned a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, it earned one of our highest grades in that category with a grade of B+. Our inspection scores are tied to several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this category typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This particular nursing home received 9 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.

The last area we analyzed is long-term care, which is this facility's weakest area. We awarded this nursing home a D in that area. Nevertheless, you should not assess this facility solely on one bad area, since it earned many very strong grades in other areas. For patients looking for a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. After considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is more than the average nursing home. To our surprise, this place was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.