Gracemore Nursing and Rehab

Gracemore Nursing and Rehab is a senior living facility located in Brunswick, Georgia. This city has a population of 63,812 people. Sporting an overall grade of B-, this is likely a middle of the road nursing home. Based on our ratings, this nursing home has some redeeming qualities. The best part of this nursing home's profile is its exemplary inspection score. Inspection reports are discussed in the next paragraph.

While this facility's overall grade was decent, it really fared well in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A+ for that category, which is one of our best scores. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively insignificant. This place received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to cause an immediate risk to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also gave this nursing home a strong grade in long-term care. This nursing home received a grade of B in this category, which turns out to be one of our better grades. Nursing homes that receive this type of grade in long-term care typically provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure patients are kept in good health. One of the datapoints we considered after nursing hours is vaccines. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccination to 99.32886 percent of its patients. This is a proven method to avoid unnecessary deaths for the aged 65 and up population. This facility also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had just 1.3 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a substantially better hospitalization rate than the average nursing home.

This nursing home's next most favorable area came in the area of short-term care. In that area, we gave this facility a B-. Our short-term care grades are considered to be most important for people in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation typically requires higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not merely nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. We were pleased to find that this nursing home employs both registered nurses and physical therapists. The same can't be said for all nursing homes. The final item we looked at in this area is the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. It fared much better in this metric with 61.5 percent of its residents returning home. For most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

This nursing home's least impressive area was nursing, which is the last category we assessed. It received an F in this category. In spite of a few decent scores in other areas, this score is nevertheless disappointing so we would like to to point it out. Nursing grades are largely based on a facility's level of nurse staffing. This particular facility offered a meager 3.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This statistic is quite a bit below average. To pair with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this facility also didn't perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing ratings. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This facility had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average nursing home. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are preventable with better nursing care. These metrics pulled down this facility's nursing rating significantly.