Still Hopes Episcopal Retirement Community

In addition to being a strong facility overall, this nursing home also excelled at short-term care, where it received an A+. Few nursing homes fared better in this area. Short-term care grades are typically employed to score a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To offer high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide better levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we assessed in this category is the number of patients who ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that 6.5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

We also awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. Our nursing rating is mostly based on a facility's nurse staffing. This facility provided 1.1 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Moving on our third category, this facility was given an excellent long-term care score. In fact, we awarded it a score of A in this area. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. One of the statistics we considered after nurse's aid hours was vaccinations. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this facility provided data regarding vaccinations. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients 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.

Lastly, this facility also earned a virtually flawless government inspection report. As a result, it earned one of our highest grades in that category with an A-. With this impressive grade, this place is one of the few facilities in South Carolina to earn straight A's. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.