Savannah Grace at the Palms of Mt Pleasant

We also found that this facility excelled in our short-term care rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Short-term care ratings are based in part on a facility's quantity of skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a broad scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Another reason we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. We weighed the skill-level of nurses employed by the facility, in addition to the quantity of hours the nurses worked with patients, in determining our grade in this category. This nursing home provides 0.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Racking up another strong category grade, this nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an impressive grade of A. Our inspection scores account for a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better scores in this category usually have few of these severe deficiencies. While this facility had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In our final category, we awarded this nursing home an A for our long-term care grade. This topped off a very impressive profile. Facilities that receive this type of score in this category tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to ensure residents are well cared for. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 95 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.