Forrest General Hospital Skilled Nursing Unit

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Arguably the most important factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with better grades in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Unfortunately, we were not able to track down deficiency data for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In addition, this nursing home was given quality marks in the area of short-term care. For this reason, it received one of our highest scores in that area with a grade of A+. Short-term care grades are based in part on a facility's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a vast range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.5 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility excelled in our nursing rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Our nursing grade analyzes the facility's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of licensure of the nurses and the number of hours spent with patients. This facility provided 0.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The fourth category we graded was long-term care, where this facility was awarded a grade of A. This wrapped up a very impressive profile. Few nursing homes received an A- or better in every single category. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary goal is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. After looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. It does not look like this facility submitted vaccination data. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.