Pruitthealth- North Augusta

Although we did not rate this nursing home well overall, we would like to note its decent inspection reports in recent years. We awarded it a relatively respectable grade of B- in that category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some are quite insignificant. This place received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe. This means that the government inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to resident safety or health. Lastly, this facility was flagged by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. We prefer to avoid facilities with this designation. Please do your best to find an alternative nursing home.

We also want to point out that this facility received a decent grade in our nursing category. We awarded it a grade of B- in the area. Our nursing rating assesses the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of skill of those nurses and the quantity of hours spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This figure is far below the national average. Lastly, our nursing ratings also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this place performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is usually an indicator that a nursing home has sufficient quality controls in place. Many falls could be avoided if a nursing home supplies enough nurses aids to assist its residents.

This nursing home's next best category turned out to be its long-term care score, where it was awarded a C. Long-term care scores are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of nursing care. This includes a broad scope of personal care services, ranging from assistance with activities of daily living to routine healthcare services. Once we assessed the quantity of nursing care, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination statistics. We were optimistic to find that this nursing home vaccinates 96.61539 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Lastly, this nursing home was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Moving on to the next area, this nursing home was given a decent short-term care grade of C. Short-term care grades are typically employed to judge a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To provide highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer higher levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the average facility. The hope is always that this does not adversely impact the quality of care. Finally, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 4.4 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.