Altamaha Healthcare Center

While this facility's overall grade was decent, it really excelled in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A+ for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This nursing home was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This tells you that the government inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

An additional strength of this nursing home is its high-end score in long-term care. We gave them one of our best grades in that category, with a score of A-. For residents looking for a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 89.69072 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is a few points less than we expected but still a decent percentage. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we had hoped, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Unfortunately, this nursing home only received a D for its short-term care grade, which is not an impressive grade. Our short-term care ratings are thought to be more important for residents requiring a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing services. This means not only nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. We found that this facility was subpar in several staffing areas we assessed. The facility supplied fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most nursing homes. The last measure we considered in this category is the number of patients who ultimately returned home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 5.1 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, this was quite a bit below average.

This facility's worst area was nursing, which is the final category we looked at. It received a lowly F in this category. Even with some decent grades in other categories, this score is still concerning so we would like to to make a note of it. Our nursing score assesses many data points, however, the primary one is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This particular nursing home averaged a meager 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This figure is significantly below the national average. In addition to its subpar nursing hour totals, this place also earned poor scores in many of the quality-based metrics we looked at in calculating our nursing ratings. We found that a higher percentage of this facility's residents sustained falls leading to serious injury.