Pruitthealth - Augusta

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with better scores in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This place was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that the inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to pose an immediate risk to resident health or safety. A few relatively minor deficiencies aren't something to panic about.

This nursing home received a strong long-term care score as well. We awarded it one of our higher grades in that area with a grade of B. Facilities that excel in this category tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. On top of considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 98.15385 percent of its residents, which is significantly higher than the average nursing home. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-. This facility didn't perform quite as well in this category as it did in some other categories. Nevertheless, this is still a respectable score. In determining a facility's nursing rating, we assess the amount of time nurses are with patients and the level of licensure of the nurses. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a relatively low total compared with most facilities. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. It performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the number of hours of care provided.

Moving on to our last category, this facility was given a respectable short-term care grade of B-. In determining our short-term care scores, we look at the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other types of therapists. This category is considered to be a solid measure of a facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of residents that eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was actually well below average.