Candler Skilled Nursing Unit

Candler Skilled Nursing Unit is located in Savannah, Georgia. This city has a total of 236,823 people. It looks like this nursing home is one of the most impressive facilities we assessed. Being awarded an A+ in our rating scheme requires excellent performance across the board. Indeed, we were so impressed with this facility that we rated it substantially ahead of the vast majority of the nursing homes in Savannah. This nursing home also received strong ratings in each of our categories. More information about these categories can be found below.

On top of earning a great overall score, this facility received an A+ for short-term care. Our short-term care grades are probably more meaningful for people in need of rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more highly-skilled nursing services. This means not only nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. This nursing home is substantially above the national average in terms of its quantity of both physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents. In fact, it provided about 50% more care per resident from both of these care providers than the average facility provided. These are generally good indicators of quality short-term care. The final measure we assessed in this category is the number of residents who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that it performed as well as just about any nursing home in Georgia in this area with 77.1 percent of its patients returning home.

This facility also earned an A+ inspection grade, making it one of the rare nursing homes to receive multiple A+'s in our categories. Inspection ratings are tied to several pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In addition, this facility received high marks in the area of nursing. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A+. There are several criteria within this grade. Most of the subcategories are tied to nurse staffing. This facility boasts a really impressive 7.6 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis, of which a significant portion of those hours were provided by registered nurses. This is one of the more highly trained levels of nurses. This is one of the higher totals of nursing hours we found at any facility. In addition to offering high levels of nursing care, this facility also excelled in the quality measures we looked at. It performed as well as any nursing home in the country in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.

In the last category we assessed, this nursing home was awarded high marks in the category of long-term care as well. As a result, it received an A+. This rendered it one of an elite handful of nursing homes to receive A+'s in all four categories. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. On top of considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We weren't able to locate this place's vaccination data. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.