Savannah Heights

One of the reasons this ended up being a strong facility is that it received a very impressive inspection score. In fact, inspections turned out to be its best category grade. In this area, we gave this facility an A+. Inspection grades are based on many pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This place was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to cause an immediate threat to patient safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

This nursing home also received an impressive short-term care score. Indeed, we awarded it an above average grade of B+ in this area. Our short-term care ratings are believed to be more important for folks requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. This means not merely nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last datapoint we considered in this category is the number of residents that eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that 5.9 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B-. This wasn't quite on par with some of its other category grades mentioned above. When calculating our nursing grades, we analyze both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the skill levels of those nurses. 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. Lastly, while this facility got dinged a bit for nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in a few of our quality metrics. With fewer than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it performed well in this statistic.

The final category we scored is long-term care, which ended up being this facility's weakest area. Sadly, it received a lowly F for this category, which is certainly a bit of a concern. Long-term care grades in this range generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids. One of the criteria we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccines. Candidly, we were a bit concerned this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to just 85.58559 percent of its patients. Surprisingly, this place actually fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.