Effingham Care & Rehabilitation Center

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some are relatively minor. This particular nursing home received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among its many high-end grades, this facility received first-rate long-term care grade. In fact, we gave it a score of A- in this category. Facilities that receive this kind of score in this category typically provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure residents are kept in good health. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 97.4212 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia tragically can be a life or death illness for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a nursing home doesn't take any chances. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility received a very good nursing grade this year as well. It received one of our better scores in that category with a grade of B+. Our nursing score includes quite a few factors, however, the primary one is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of turning a resident more often.

The next category we assessed is short-term care. This facility was awarded a very good short-term care rating this year, with a grade of B-. Although this was not quite as elite as some of its other grades, this is nevertheless a respectable grade for that category. In forming these short-term care scores, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our objective is to create a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. We were not able to find information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. The last datapoint we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is actually below average.