Amara Healthcare & Rehab

Amara Healthcare & Rehab is just one of 10 possibilities in Augusta, Georgia. We gave this facility a B- overall, which is a decent grade. This is comparable with the city grade in Augusta, which is a B. In our view, this facility would be a good fit for quite a few people. One of the major highlights of this nursing home's profile is its stellar inspection grade, which we will address in the next paragraph.

While this nursing home'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 best scores. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with better scores in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

This facility also was awarded a favorable grade in our long-term care category. We awarded this nursing home a better than average grade of B+ in that category. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. After assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 98.55908 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. The last statistic we looked at is its hospitalization rate. We found that this nursing home had 1.74 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is middle of the road in this area.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. When calculating our nursing grades, we factor in both staffing levels and the skill levels of those nurses. This facility provides 3.9 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is better than average. In calculating our nursing ratings, we apply additional weight to hours performed by more highly trained nurses such as registered nurses. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in some quality-focused statistics. Specifically, we look at the percent of residents who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these metrics as reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

Turning to our fourth category, this facility really didn't perform very well. Due to a rock bottom grade of F in short-term care, this was its worst grade. In our short-term care category, we seek to create a fair gauge for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we assess the nursing home's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. We found that this facility was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its residents based on the measures we looked at. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who eventually returned home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 23.1 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.