Wellmore of Tega Cay

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Our inspection scores account for a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better scores in this area generally have few severe deficiencies. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This means that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also gave this facility a grade of A+ for its short-term care grade. Short-term care scores are based on a nursing home's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a wide range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. 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. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.7 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

We also gave this nursing home a of A+ for its long-term care grade. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 96.739136 percent of its residents, which is more than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep 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.

In our last category, this nursing home received another A+ for its nursing score, completing a truly spectacular profile of straight A+'s in all four categories. We assessed the licensure of nurses at the nursing home, as well as the number of hours those nurses were with patients, in calculating our score in this area. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these statistics as good indicators of the caliber of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.