Lake City Scranton Healthcare Center

This facility's best category grade came in nursing. In this area, we gave this nursing home a B. It outperformed most facilities in this area. There are numerous subcategories within this area. Many of these subcategories are tied to nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this place 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 generally be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a system of moving patients at least once a day.

This facility also was given a positive long-term care grade. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B in that area, which happens to be one of our better. For patients looking for a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 91.17647 percent of its patients. This is slightly less than we expected but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This facility's third most favorable category came in the area of short-term care. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-. In our short-term care score, we seek to craft a valuable measure for rehabilitation services. In this process, we analyze the nursing home's offerings of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. In this place's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the typical facility. The hope is always that this does not adversely impact the quality of care. Finally, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.2 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

In the final area we looked at, we found that this nursing home earned a solid inspection report this year as well, with few major dings from government inspectors. It earned a decent score in our inspection category with a B-. This facility didn't have any major weak links. We believe that one of the most important factors in assessing an inspection report is deficiencies. We especially look at the severity of those deficiencies. This place received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This indicates that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to be an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.