Skyland Care Center

We would like to point out that this facility's inspection rating exceeded its overall score. This facility earned a B+ in this category, which is a quality score. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection scores. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively insignificant. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through 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. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

Additionally, we also would like to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home was given favorable short-term care marks this year. We gave them one of our more favorable grades in this category, with a B+. This proved to be the nursing home's second strongest score. In the category of short-term care, we endeavor to assess measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We assess a nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last item we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 5.3 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-, which is a decent grade. The nursing grade assesses many datapoints, many of which are tied to nursing hours. This nursing home provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This figure is far below average. Lastly, our nursing scores also consider quality-based assessments, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this facility performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is typically an indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place. Many falls could be avoided if a facility provides enough nurses aids to assist its patients.

Our final category is long-term care, where we gave this nursing home a grade of C in that area. In computing these long-term care ratings, we look at the facility's personal care services. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination record. We were optimistic to find that this nursing home vaccinated 99.66102 percent of its residents against pneumonia. This facility keeps 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 number.