Appling Healthcare

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this facility also received an A+ long-term care grade. When facilities receive this kind of score in long-term care it is usually a good sign for patient care and indicates that the place is well-staffed with nurses and aids. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 99.66443 percent of its residents, which is far higher than the majority of nursing homes. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This nursing home also earned an A+ inspection grade, making it one of the rare nursing homes to receive multiple A+'s in our category grades. This is based on the facility's inspections. Inspection ratings are based on several datapoints located in the a nursing home's inspections. Nursing homes that score well in this area tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This facility was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of these deficiencies to be an imminent risk to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B. When computing our nursing grades, we factor in both nursing hours and the training levels of the nurses. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Switching gears to our fourth area, this facility was given an acceptable short-term care grade. While this is not nearly as impressive as several of its other scores, this is still not a major area of concern. Our short-term care scores are meaningful for residents seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. This means a broad scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this nursing home. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.