Pa Peterson at the Citadel

Although this nursing home's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it didn't perform terribly in our short-term care rating. In fact, we awarded it a B- for that category, which is a decent score. Unfortunately, this was not enough to salvage its overall profile. Our short-term care scores are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This includes a broad spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Unfortunately, we found that this place provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The key is determining what bearing this had on the quality of care. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients that ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 5 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit below the national average.

We were also surprised to find that this facility received a decent nursing grade this year. We gave it a grade of B- in that category. Our nursing score is mostly tied to the facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a somewhat concerning figure which is well below average. Lastly, nursing scores also consider quality-based measures, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this nursing home actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is often an indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place. Some falls could be avoided if a nursing home supplies enough nurses aids to assist its patients.

Sadly, this facility received a grade of just D in our inspection category. This is well below average grade. One of the most critical factors in assessing an inspection report is deficiencies. We suggest you pay close attention to the level of severity of those deficiencies. This particular facility was hit with a category J or K deficiency, which rank among the worst categories of deficiencies. These categories mean that CMS found a deficiency which places resident safety or health in imminent jeopardy. Finally, we would like to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home was assessed large government fines in recent years totaling over $100,000. This usually means that a facility's bad track record spanned several years.

Turning to the next area, this nursing home really did not perform very well in this area either. With a very poor grade of F in long-term care, this is just about as terrible as it gets. For residents looking for a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. One of the data points we considered on top of nurse's aid hours was vaccines. Thankfully, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 99.72603 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this facility also fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.