Oakhaven Nursing Center

With an address in Darlington, South Carolina, Oakhaven Nursing Center is one of a mere three available nursing homes in the city. We awarded this facility an overall grade of B. A grade in this range requires quality scores in most areas. Based on our assessment, this facility looks like a good fit for most people. This facility's impressive report card was highlighted by its inspection score, which is addressed in the next section.

On top of receiving a great overall score, this place also received top notch government inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our higher scores in this category, with an A+. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with better scores in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among this nursing home's other achievements is its dominant long-term care score. We gave them one of our more impressive grades in that area, with a score of A. When nursing homes receive this kind of grade in long-term care it is a good sign for resident care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses aids. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is significantly higher than the majority of nursing homes. Finally, we looked at the facility's number of hospitalizations. We found that this facility had 2.87 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Although this wasn't as impressive as some of its other scores in this area, this statistic may be skewed for some nursing homes due to some of the preexisting medical conditions of patients.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of C. While this didn't quite match its scores in some of the categories discussed above, this is still a decent score. The nursing rating assesses quite a few factors, however, the primary one is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provides an impressive 4 hours of nursing care per patient daily. Lastly, our nursing grades also include quality-based measures, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed better than average in this area. This is typically a good indicator of how carefully a facility's nursing staff is tending to its residents. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The last area we looked at is short-term care. We awarded this facility a D for our short-term care category, leaving this as the nursing home's worst category. In the area of short-term care, we endeavor to assess indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and various therapists. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. Finally, we considered the number of residents who returned home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 23 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.