Appling Healthcare

On top of being a first rate facility overall, this facility also excelled in the area of long-term care, where it earned a grade of A+. Few facilities performed better in this category. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 95.37954 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia can be a life or death ailment for nursing home patients so we like it when a nursing home does not roll the dice on this issue. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility has earned near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. Inspection ratings are tied to many pieces of information found on the a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this area tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and 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 health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility received a very good nursing grade this year as well. It received one of our better scores in that category with a grade of B+. In computing a nursing home's nursing rating, we weigh the quantity of hours nurses are seeing patients as well as the level of skill of the nurses. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Switching gears to our fourth area, this nursing home also excelled in the short-term care category. We gave it a grade of B+ for this area. This wrapped up a very strong profile. In determining our short-term care ratings, we analyze the facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other licensed professionals. This rating is frequently a useful measure of a facility's rehabilitation. It does not look like this nursing home provided data regarding its registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The final statistic we looked at in this area is the number of patients that ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.