Life Care Center of Columbia

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A in our nursing category. There are several datapoints within this area. Many of these criteria are tied to nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics 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 the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by having a system of moving a patient more often.

Turning to our inspection category, this facility excelled in that area, which is based on the facility's recent government inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A- for that category. Arguably the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

This nursing home was given a favorable short-term care grade as well. We gave it one of our better scores in that category with a grade of B+. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to measure a facility's rehabilitation services To have high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide better levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. It doesn't appear that this facility submitted data regarding its registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.4 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

In the final category we analyzed, this facility received an impressive grade grade of B+ in our long-term care category. With this score, the facility rounded out an elite report card. Facilities that receive this type of score in long-term care tend to provide consistent around the clock care to ensure patients are kept in good health. After we finished looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 88.17204 percent of its patients for pneumonia. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we like to see, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.