Quality Life Services - Chicora

The primary reason this facility received a decent overall grade is its impeccable government inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our better scores in that category, with a grade of A. This is a notably better score than the place's overall grade, which was decent but not in the elite range. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with better scores in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. A few minor deficiencies are not necessarily something to panic about.

We also gave this facility a favorable grade in long-term care. This facility earned a grade of B in this category, which is one of our higher grades. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in this category it typically means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 97.15099 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is too frequently a life threatening health condition for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility doesn't leave this to chance. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. Our nursing rating assesses the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of skill of the nurses as well as the amount of time spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place excelled in some of the quality measures we looked at. In fact, it scored well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these areas to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the number of hours of care offered.

This nursing home's worst area was short-term care, which is the last area we assessed. For this category, we gave this facility a grade of just D. In computing our short-term care ratings, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The objective is to formulate a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. In this nursing home's case, we found that it provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. This wasn't a strength for this facility. We found that just 4.3 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.