Skyland Care Center

In addition to being a strong facility overall, this place really excelled in our inspections category, where it earned an A+. Few facilities performed better in this category. Inspection scores account for several factors found on a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better grades in this area typically have very few of these severe deficiencies. This nursing home was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to create an immediate threat to patient safety or health. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

This nursing home also was awarded an impressive short-term care grade. In fact, we awarded it an above average score of B in this area. Our short-term care grade is generally used to score a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To have high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we looked at in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 5.1 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

We also gave this facility a respectable grade in the area of long-term care, with a grade of B-. Long-term care ratings are based on a facility's volume of care. This includes a broad scope of personal care services, ranging from help with activities of daily living to routine healthcare services. On top of considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Thankfully, this nursing home provided the vaccine to 99.3007 percent of its patients, which is a very solid percentage. This facility was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Turning to the next area, this nursing home was awarded a grade of B- in nursing, which is an acceptable rating. In computing a facility's nursing score, we assess the number of hours nurses commit to patients as well as the level of skill of those nurses. This place provides only 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a somewhat concerning figure which is well below the national average. Lastly, our nursing grades also consider quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this nursing home performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is generally a reliable indicator that a nursing home has sufficient quality controls in place. Some falls could be avoided if a facility supplies enough nurses to assist its residents.