Signature Healthcare of Savannah

We want to point out that this nursing home outperformed its overall grade in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, we gave it one of our highest grades in that category with a grade of A. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection scores. One of those factors is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively minor. While this place had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

We also awarded this facility a favorable grade in long-term care. This nursing home received a B+ in this category, which turns out to be one of our higher grades. For prospective residents looking for a permanent place to live rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are an important measure. After considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 88.947365 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which happens to be a bit below what we expected but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Sadly, this facility only earned a grade of D for its short-term care score, which is not an impressive grade. Our short-term care grades are considered to be more meaningful for those in need of rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing. This includes not merely nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. With its score in this category, we weren't stunned to find that this place is well below average in terms of its number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the data we assessed. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. This wasn't a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 4.6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.

This nursing home's least impressive area is nursing, which is the final category we scored. It received a lowly F for this category. Despite several decent scores in other areas, this score is still disappointing so we felt obligated to point it out. There are a variety of criteria included in this area. Many of the data points relate to the quantity of nurse staffing. With only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis, this facility's nurse staffing levels were significantly below the national average. To pair with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this nursing home also did not perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing ratings. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This facility had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average facility. This could be a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These metrics hurt this facility's nursing rating quite a bit.