Pruitthealth-Orangeburg

One of the reasons this turned out to be a strong nursing home is that it received an impressive inspection score. In fact, inspections is its best category. In this category, we gave it an A. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some can be quite minor. This nursing home was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility fared well in our long-term care category. Indeed, we gave it a grade of A- for that area, which turns out to be one of our best grades. Facilities that excel in this category tend to provide residents with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. One of the factors we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccines. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a reliable method to avoid unnecessary hospitalizations for the nursing home population. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The third category we looked at was short-term care, where this nursing home was awarded a C in this category. Our short-term care grades are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a wide spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. It doesn't look like this nursing home provided data regarding its registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Finally, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.4 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

The next category we analyzed is nursing. This facility was awarded a grade of C for the area. We scrutinized the licensure of nurses working for the facility, in addition to the number of hours those nurses worked with patients, in calculating our grade in this area. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Finally, despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this nursing home performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is typically a reliable indicator that a nursing home has sufficient quality controls in place.