Touchmark on South Hill Nursing

In addition to being a strong nursing home overall, this facility also excelled at short-term care, where it received a grade of A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. In determining our short-term care scores, we size up the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This area is more often than not a useful assessment of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final item we considered in this area is the percentage of patients that ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that 7.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

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 category assesses several datapoints, most of which are tied to nursing hours. This particular nursing home 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.

In addition, this nursing home also received a nearly flawless government inspection report. It received one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A. Our inspection grades are based on datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do 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 final area we rated is long-term care. We gave this facility a solid grade in that area, with a B-. While this wasn't as favorable as a few of this nursing home's other scores, it is still not a poor grade. Our long-term care grade is commonly used to grade a facility's performance as a traditional convalescent home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services provided by a skilled nursing facility. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 97.22222 percent of its patients. This place 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 figure.