Life Care Center of Columbia

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively insignificant. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also would like to point out the fact that this facility was given a high-end score of A in our long-term care category. Facilities that excel in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. After looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 94.014084 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is better than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home also was awarded an impressive short-term care grade. In fact, we awarded it an above average score of B in this category. With our short-term care score, we attempt to forge a sound measure for rehabilitation. In this process, we look at a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Unfortunately, we were not able to find information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Finally, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.7 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The final category we scored is nursing. We awarded this nursing home one of our higher grades in this category, with a grade of B. Even though this isn't as dominant as a few of this nursing home's other scores, it is still an excellent score. In computing our nursing ratings, we factor in both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the skill levels of the nurses. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics 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 nursing home the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a policy of moving patients at least once a day.