Caroleton Healthcare Center

This nursing home received a quality overall grade as described above, but we especially wanted to emphasize its nearly flawless government inspections in recent years. We gave them an A+ in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are quite insignificant. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the category of long-term care. We gave them one of our more favorable scores in that category, with a grade of B+. Nursing homes that receive this kind of grade in this category typically provide consistent around the clock care to make sure patients are well cared for. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 99.42857 percent of its residents, which is significantly higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep 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 figure.

Turning to the category of nursing care, this facility didn't perform quite as well in this area as some of the categories discussed above. Nevertheless, a grade of B- in this category is by no means a bad score. We assessed the skill-level of nurses employed by the nursing home, as well as the number of hours those nurses worked with patients, in determining our score in this category. This particular nursing home provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This figure is significantly below the national average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility surprisingly fared better in some of the quality measures we assessed. In fact, it performed well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the number of hours of care offered.

The next area we scored was short-term care, was this facility's worst category. We awarded this facility a D in that area. This is one of just a couple of weak points in a strong report card. In our short-term care grade, we attempt to craft a valuable measure for rehabilitation. In doing so, we look at a nursing home's level of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. In this place's case, we found that it provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than the average facility. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. This wasn't a strength for this facility. We found that just 4.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. At most facilities, around half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.