Savannah Square Health Center

Savannah Square Health Center is a small nursing home in Savannah, Georgia. We awarded this nursing home a quality overall grade of B+. In fact, we ranked it as the fifth best facility in Savannah. Even in a city of 11 nursing homes, this facility is a great option. The best part of this nursing home's impressive report card was its inspection rating. We discuss inspections in the next paragraph

In addition to performing well overall, this facility also earned nearly flawless government inspections. Therefore, it received one of our highest grades in that area with an A+. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively minor. While this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to this facility's list of achievements, it also was awarded a superb short-term care score. We gave them an impressive strong of A in this area. Our short-term care scores are important for people looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a broad spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. This nursing home boosted its score in this category by offering more physical therapy hours to its residents than the average facility. The last item we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it performed as well as just about any nursing home in Georgia in this area with 64.2 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, at most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

In addition, this facility also was awarded favorable long-term care scores this year. Indeed, we gave them one of our higher grades in that area, with a grade of B. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. Once we finished looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is often a deadly condition for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home doesn't take any chances. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 1.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home had less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes.

The final area we scored is nursing, was this facility's least impressive category. We awarded this facility a D in that category. This is one of the few weak points on an otherwise strong report card. When calculating a nursing home's nursing rating, we consider the number of hours nurses are seeing residents and the level of licensure of those nurses. This facility provided 3.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is below the national average. Unfortunately, this place also did not fare as well as we had hoped in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed in this category.