Columbia Health Care Center

In addition to receiving a great overall rating, this facility also earned an A+ inspection grade. This grade is based on its recent inspection reports. An A+ in this category is one of the highest complements we can pay to a nursing home. Inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. 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.

Among its many high-end grades, this nursing home received a top-shelf long-term care score. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A in this area. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in long-term care it generally means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 97.683395 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is far higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A in our nursing category. Nursing grades are largely based on a nursing home's nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving a resident at least once a day.

The next area we looked at is short-term care. We awarded this nursing home a decent grade in this area, with a grade of B-. While this was not as strong as many of this facility's other grades, it is nevertheless not the end of the world. Our short-term care scores are arguably more important for those in need of rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically requires more highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 4.5 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.