John Edward Harter Nursing Center

To go along with its strong overall score, we awarded this nursing home an A+ for inspections. Inspection grades weigh a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we rely on is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better scores in this category usually have few of these severe deficiencies. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate information on deficiency's for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. Nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an A+. Nursing grades are based in large part on levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed 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 place South Carolina in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving patients even once per day.

This nursing home also was given an A+ for its long-term care score. If you are seeking anything other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care scores. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 89.87342 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is a few points below what we anticipated but still a reasonably acceptable figure. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we like to see, at least this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

In our last category, we awarded this nursing home an A+ for its short-term care score. This completed a very favorable profile. Our short-term care scores are likely more meaningful for people needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically mandates additional skilled nursing services. This includes not only nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.