Autumn Care of Saluda

With an address in Saluda, North Carolina, Autumn Care of Saluda is the lone nursing home located in the city. Featuring an overall score of D, this is a relatively poor facility. As far as we can see, we'd be very reluctant to recommend this facility. If you aren't deterred by this facility's profile, feel free to continue reading to find out about its category grades. Inspection grades are discussed in the next paragraph.

While we were not high on this nursing home's overall grade, it received a very impressive inspection report this year. In fact, it received an excellent inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our best grades in that category with an A. These inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This tells you that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

This nursing home's second best area was short-term care. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. This is essentially a slightly below average grade in this category. In computing our short-term care grades, we analyze a facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This category is generally a solid measure of a nursing home's rehabilitation. One of this nursing home's strengths is physical therapy hours. We found that it offers more hours with physical therapists to its residents than most facilities. The last datapoint we looked at in this area is the number of patients that were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that it performed better than most nursing homes in this area with 49.5 percent of its residents returning home. For most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

This facility's next best category was nursing, but even there it received a grade of just D. This is still a well below average grade. Our nursing grade focuses on the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of skill of the nurses as well as the amount of time spent with residents. This nursing home provided just 3.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is an alarmingly low total. To go along with its below average totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this facility had bad scores in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in determining our nursing grades. We looked at the percentage of residents having falls leading to major injury. This nursing home was at more than 150 percent of the national average in this statistic.

The last area we scored was long-term care, in which this facility received an abysmal score here as well. We gave it an abysmal F in this area, which is definitely a major concern. For prospective patients looking for a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 99.2278 percent of its patients, which is higher than the average nursing home. Surprisingly, this facility also fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 1.34 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.