Azalea Trail Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection grades. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are quite insignificant. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

This facility is also above average in the area of long-term care, where it was awarded a grade of B+. It performed better than most facilities in this area. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. Once we concluded our assessment of the quantity of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 96.91358 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is too frequently a dangerous ailment for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a nursing home doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of B-. While this didn't quite match its scores in some of the categories discussed above, this is still a decent score. When determining a facility's nursing rating, we weigh the amount of time nurses are with patients and the levels of training of those nurses. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Finally, nursing scores also consider quality-based assessments, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this place performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is generally a good indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place. Some falls could be avoided if a nursing home supplies enough nurses to assist its patients.

The final area we analyzed was short-term care. For that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. In the area of short-term care, we seek to evaluate measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit below the national average.