Blue Ridge in Georgetown

This nursing home did not perform quite as poorly in the area of long-term care. We gave it a grade of B- for that category. Our long-term care ratings are more important for patients in need of more conventional assistance related to personal care. After considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination data. Frankly, we were a bit alarmed this nursing home vaccinated 86.46616 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is significantly below what we expected. Nevertheless, this facility was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

As it turns out, its government inspection reports were not the source of this facility's abysmal overall grade. It earned a grade of C in this category. These inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. To our surprise, this nursing home had a category J through K deficiency, which are some of the worst categories of deficiencies. This usually means the government inspectors identified a deficiency which places resident safety or health in immediate danger. Unfortunately, we also need to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received significant government fines in recent years.

Sadly, this nursing home's next best category is short-term care. Nevertheless, with a D in this category, it still performed somewhat poorly. With our short-term care assessment, we endeavor to forge a fair barometer for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we assess the facility's scope of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Based on its weak grade in this area, we weren't stunned to learn that this facility offered substantially fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most nursing homes. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

The next category we assessed is nursing. Sadly, it received a lowly F for this area, which is a poor score. Nursing scores are mostly associated with the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. On top of receiving below average scores for nursing hours, this place was less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of patients experiencing pressure ulcers and found that this nursing home was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, this statistic dragged down this nursing home's nursing grade substantially.