Columbia Post Acute

One of the main reasons this turned out to be a strong nursing home is that it earned a very impressive long-term care grade. This is its best category. In that area, we gave this nursing home a grade of A. Facilities that excel in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is significantly higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home 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 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility received impressive scores in the category of short-term care as well. In fact, it received one of our most favorable scores in that area with a area of A. Our short-term care scores are believed to be most critical for those needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation usually requires more highly-skilled nursing services. This includes not just nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of residents that were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 6.9 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

Moving on to another of this facility's strengths, it also earned a very impressive inspection score. In that category, we gave this facility an impressive grade of A-. Our inspection ratings account for a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher grades in this area typically have very few of these severe deficiencies. 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.

The next category we assessed proved to be this facility's weakest area. However, even in its weakest link we still awarded it an acceptable grade of C in nursing. Nursing grades are based in large part on quantity of nursing care available. This nursing home averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident daily, which is not an impressive total. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home actually excelled in some of the quality measures we looked at. It performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.