Focused Care at Mount Pleasant

While we were not high on this nursing home overall, we gave it a B for long-term care. This grade is far more impressive than the facility's overall grade. In fact, without this category, this place's profile would have been even worse. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. Once we assessed the volume of nursing care, we then looked at the facility's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 96.53465 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is too frequently a deadly condition for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a facility does not take any chances. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This nursing home actually received a decent grade in the area of nursing as well. We awarded it a grade of B- for that category, which is not a bad score. Nursing grades are primarily tied to the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This place provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is a low total compared to most facilities. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics. While this place got docked a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it excelled in some of these quality measures. With less than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it fared very well in this metric. This is often a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a system of moving residents even once per day.

This nursing home's third best category came in the area of short-term care. In that area, we gave this facility a C. Short-term care grades are generally employed to assess a facility's rehabilitation services To provide highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. In this nursing home's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than a typical facility. The hope is that this does not adversely affect the quality of care. The last measure we looked at in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is below average.

The last category we looked at is inspections. Unfortunately, this ended up being this nursing home's worst grade. We gave it just a D in this area. Since this information is collected by independent government inspectors, we weight it heavily in our assessment. Our inspection scores weigh many items found on the nursing home's recent inspection reports. When you see severe deficiencies on the reports, this is generally a bad sign. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to patient safety. This particular facility was hit with 4 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only favorable thing we found is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that suggest that they caused a risk to resident safety or health. Lastly, we also need to point out that this facility received large government fines of over $100,000. This generally means that a nursing home's bad track record has been an issue for more than one year.