Carolina Bay Healthcare Center of Wilmington

We also wanted to point out the fact that this nursing home has received near flawless inspections recently. We awarded them an A+ in this category. Inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Compounding its dominant accomplishments in other areas, we awarded this facility a score of A for our short-term care rating. With our short-term care assessment, we seek to forge a meaningful gauge for rehabilitation services. In this process, we assess a facility's levels of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return home from this facility. We found that 5.5 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Building on its strong resume, this nursing home also received a dominant long-term care score, with a score of A. Facilities that do well in long-term care typically provide patients with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. On top of considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 95 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is often a life threatening condition for nursing home residents so we like it when a nursing home doesn't leave this to chance. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In our final area, we gave this facility a grade of A+ for our nursing rating. This topped off a very strong report card. There are a number of data points within this category. Most of these criteria reflect the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these areas as good indicators of the quality of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.