Emanuel County Nursing Home

To go along with its favorable overall grade, we awarded this facility an A- for the area of inspections. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also awarded this facility a grade of A- for our long-term care grade. Nursing homes that excel in this category tend to provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly is often a deadly ailment for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility does not take any chances. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility was awarded an impressive short-term care score as well. We gave it one of our higher scores in that area with a grade of B. With our short-term care rating, we attempt to create a fair measure for rehabilitation. In this process, we look at a nursing home's level of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Unfortunately, we were not able to track down registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this facility. The last metric we looked at in this area is the number of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

The final area we rated is nursing. We awarded this facility a grade of B- in this area. When calculating our nursing scores, we look at both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the training levels of the nurses. This nursing home averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home actually fared better in some of the quality measures we looked at. It scored well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.