Blue Ridge Healthcare Windwood

Although we gave this nursing home a horrible overall score, we awarded it an A- for our inspections rating. This grade is far more impressive than the facility's overall grade. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. It is typically in your best interest to avoid nursing homes that had a long list of severe deficiencies. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. A few minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

We awarded this nursing home a grade of just D for our long-term care score and that actually turned out to be its second most favorable score. Facilities that don't fare well in long-term care often do not provide as much nursing care and also may be struggling in a few of the areas of routine healthcare services we assessed. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination statistics. We were a bit alarmed this facility vaccinated 65.408806 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is quite a bit below what we were hoping for. To our surprise, this facility actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.

The third category we looked at is short-term care, in which this nursing home was given an F. Our short-term care grades are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of skilled nursing services. This means a broad range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other types of therapy. With a grade of this caliber in this category, we weren't stunned to learn this place was below average in the two key staffing metrics we assess. The nursing home supplied significantly fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most facilities. The last item we considered in this category is the number of residents that were able to return home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 0 percent of its patients returning home. This was quite a bit below the national average.

The final category we rated was nursing, where this nursing home was given a rock bottom grade in this area also. We gave it a lowly F in this category, which is obviously very concerning. In computing our nursing grades, we factor in both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the training levels of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.1 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing scores. This nursing home performed well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.