Wellmore of Tega Cay

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This place was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This high end facility also excelled in the area of short-term care, where we awarded it a score of A+. Few facilities performed better in this category. In the area of short-term care, we try to evaluate measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that 6.9 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A in our nursing category. The nursing rating weighs quite a few datapoints, many of which are based on nursing hours. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place 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 generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

In the final category we scored, this nursing home was awarded a very strong grade of B+ in our long-term care category. With this score, the nursing home rounded out a first-rate profile. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it typically means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. After we finished looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is too frequently a life or death health condition for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility does not roll the dice on this issue. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.