Alcoa Pines Health and Rehabilitation

This facility's best category grade came in the area of inspections. In this category, we awarded this facility a B+. It outperformed most facilities in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being relatively minor. We weren't able to track down deficiency counts for this nursing home. Without complete information regarding deficiencies for this facility, it was challenging to fully assess it in the inspections category.

This nursing home's next highest category is short-term care. In that area, we gave this facility a B-. In calculating our short-term care grades, we scrutinize a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other licensed professionals. This category is frequently a useful measure of a facility's rehabilitation services. Unfortunately, we found that this facility provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. The more important thing is determining what effect this had on the quality of care. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who ultimately returned home from this nursing home. We found that 5.5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit below average.

This nursing home was awarded its third most favorable category score in the area of long-term care. We gave this nursing home a B- in this area, which is a respectable score. Long-term care grades are generally used to grade a facility's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services offered by a rehabilitation facility. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 97.57085 percent of its patients. Lastly, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home's least impressive area is nursing, which is the last category we looked at. For this category, we awarded this nursing home a D. The nursing rating is based on a variety of subcategories. The most important variable is the quantity of hours nurses spent with patients. This facility offered a meager 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This statistic is quite a bit below average. To pair with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this nursing home also did not fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing ratings. We looked at the percent of patients experiencing pressure ulcers and major falls. This facility had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average nursing home. This could be a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, these statistics pulled down this facility's nursing rating quite a bit.