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 98.9899 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 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility also received a virtually flawless inspection report. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that area with an A+. This is one of the few places to receive multiple A+'s. Inspection ratings are based on many datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent government inspections. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this category typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this place had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that CMS didn't consider 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.

This nursing home also received a strong nursing score. In fact, we awarded it an above average grade of B+ in this area. Nursing ratings are largely tied to a facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving patients more frequently.

Turning to the last area, this facility was given a decent short-term care rating. While this wasn't as strong as several of its other grades, this is still not a bad grade. In forming these short-term care scores, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to create a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The final measure we looked at in this area is the number of patients who returned home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. This figure was below the national average.