Camellia Gardens Care Center

Although we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a C for our inspections rating. In fact, the facility received very impressive inspection report this year. Our inspection scores are tied to pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are a key thing to look for on these inspections. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to the well being of residents. This place was assessed 10 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to find that none were category G through L deficiencies. This means this facility dodged the more ominous categories of deficiencies. Unfortunately, we also need to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received significant government fines in recent years.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. This proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of C. There are many datapoints within this category. Most of the datapoints are tied to the quantity of nurse staffing. This place averages just 0.5 hours of nursing care per patient per day, which is a very low figure. Finally, nursing ratings also consider quality-based metrics, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this nursing home performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is typically a good indicator that a facility has sufficient quality controls in place. Some falls could be avoided if a nursing home supplies enough nurses to assist its residents.

Incredibly, we gave this nursing home a C for our short-term care rating, which really isn't a bad grade. Our short-term care grade is often employed to assess a facility's rehabilitation services In order to have high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to have higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than a typical facility. The hope is that this does not adversely affect the quality of care. The last datapoint we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This nursing home's weakest area is long-term care, which is the final area we assessed. For this category, we awarded this facility a D. For prospective residents in need of a permanent place to live rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are an important measure. One of the data points we considered on top of nurse's aid hours is vaccines. Fortunately, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.