Wildewood Downs Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

Wildewood Downs Nursing and Rehabilitation Center is located in the large metropolitan area of Columbia, South Carolina. With an overall grade of A+, this nursing home is without a doubt a top-shelf nursing home. This turned out to be substantially better than many of the facilities in Columbia. Finally, this is a very consistent nursing home with consistently strong ratings in each of the major categories. More information about these categories is available below.

To pair with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. Short-term care grades are often employed to judge a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to provide highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide higher levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include 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. The facility supplied about 50% more care from physical therapists and registered nurses than the average facility. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of facilities in this area with 76.6 percent of its residents returning home.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we gave this nursing home an A+. Our nursing grade includes quite a few factors, most of which are based on nursing hours. This place provides an incredible 8.1 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Out of that total, many of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the more highly trained levels of nurses. In addition to providing impressive levels of care, this nursing home also excelled in the quality-based metrics we assessed. It performed as well as any facility in the nation when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

The next area we analyzed was long-term care. This facility fared very well in our long-term care rating also. We gave them an exemplary grade of A+ in this category. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. After looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. It does not look like this facility submitted vaccination data. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Lastly, this facility has received near flawless inspections in recent years. We gave them an A in this category. This is one of the few facilities in the nation to receive an A- or better in every single category. Our inspection ratings weigh several factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area generally have few severe deficiencies. While this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This means that the inspectors didn't 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.