Lake City Scranton Healthcare Center

Lake City Scranton Healthcare Center is an average-sized facility in Scranton, South Carolina. It looks like this facility is a relatively poor nursing home. A score of this caliber suggests we found a few red flags. This was not the worse facility we found, however, we would still be very reluctant to recommend it. We wouldn't blame you if you're ready to stop reading and find another nursing home. However, if you want to learn more about this nursing home's category grades, long-term care grades are discussed in the next paragraph.

Although this facility's overall score wasn't a highlight, it really fared well in the area of long-term care. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our better grades. This kept this facility from receiving an even worse overall score. If you are seeking services other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care ratings. After considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 82.22222 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is a few points below what we expected but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. The last statistic we looked at is the nursing home's hospitalization rate. Here we found that this nursing home had 2.89 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. While this admittedly wasn't as impressive as some of its other scores in this area, this statistic may be skewed for some nursing homes due to the medical complexity of patients.

Another strength for this facility is its impeccable inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our better grades in that area, with an B+. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being relatively insignificant. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

This facility ended up receiving rock bottom score in our nursing category. It received an F in this category. When determining a nursing home's nursing score, we assess the amount of time nurses are caring for residents as well as the skill levels of the nurses. This particular nursing home provided 3.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day, which is below average. To pair with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this place also didn't fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This nursing home had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average facility.

Switching gears to the last area, this facility didn't perform very well in this area either. Due to an abysmal grade of F in short-term care, this is about as as uninspiring as it gets. In computing our short-term care ratings, we look at the facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This category is generally a fair measure of the facility's rehabilitation services. As you might expect, we found that this place offers substantially less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than the typical facility. Finally, we assessed the number of patients that ultimately returned home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 42 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.