Carolina Bay Healthcare Center of Wilmington

On top of being a strong facility overall, it also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were nearly flawless. These inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by obtaining 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.

We also would like to emphasize the fact that this facility was given a high-end grade of A in our short-term care area. In calculating our short-term care grades, we look at the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This grade is more often than not a fair assessment of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. 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 to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

This nursing home also was given a fine long-term care score. In fact, this turned out to be its third best category score. In that category, this facility received a score of A-. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly is often a deadly condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The final area we scored was nursing. We awarded this facility one of our more favorable grades in this area, with a grade of B. While this wasn't as high as many of its other scores, it is still a positive score. Our nursing grade focuses on the facility's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of skill of those nurses and the amount of time spent with residents. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at a few quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home excelled in these areas, with excellent scores for minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. These areas are generally reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care a facility provides.