Still Hopes Episcopal Retirement Community

Still Hopes Episcopal Retirement Community is located in West Columbia, South Carolina, a city with a population of 52,126 people. This nursing home is an A+ rated facility, which is our absolute highest grade. In fact, we were so impressed with this facility that we ranked it as the best nursing home in West Columbia. This facility was also given impressive scores in all of the major categories. More information about these categories can be found below.

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ short-term care grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Our short-term care grade is generally used to score a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to offer high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must offer higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This facility excelled at the highest level in two key staffing areas we looked at. In fact, it provided about 50% more care from physical therapists and registered nurses than the typical nursing home. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients that ultimately returned home from this facility. On top of excelling in the area of physical therapy, we found that it performed as well as just about any nursing home in the country with 75.7 percent of its patients returning home.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing rating. In fact, nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we gave this nursing home an A+. In determining our nursing grades, we look at both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the training levels of those nurses. This nursing home provided 8.8 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis, which is among the higher totals in the country. A significant percentage of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are one of the most skilled levels of nurses. We were really impressed by both of these statistics. In addition to offering impressive levels of nursing care, this facility also excelled in the quality-based metrics we looked at. It performed as well as any facility in South Carolina in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.

The next area we looked at was long-term care. This nursing home also received an A+ long-term care grade, making it one of the few facilities to be given several A+ category scores. Nursing homes that receive this type of grade in this category typically provide consistent around the clock care to ensure residents are well cared for. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Unfortunately, we weren't able to track down this place's vaccination data. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Adding to its impressive category grades, this nursing home also excelled in inspections, where it earned an impressive grade of A. This rounded out a straight A report card for this place. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being quite minor. 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.