Carolina Pines at Asheville

We were not able to award this facility any respectable grades. We wanted to point out that it received an F for its short-term care grade. Our short-term care scores are crucial for individuals in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a vast scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. With a grade this poor in this area, we were not stunned to learn that this nursing home was below average in the two key staffing figures we focus on. The nursing home provided significantly fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most facilities. The last measure we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 5.1 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics doomed this nursing home's short-term care score.

Unfortunately, this facility earned an F for its inspection rating. This is a very important category. Grades in this range typically point to some red flags on the facility's inspection reports. With nursing homes that received this bad of an inspection score, we recommend scrutinizing the severe deficiencies on its inspection report. This particular nursing home was assessed 6 deficiencies by CMS. The only favorable thing we found is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they caused a threat to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. We would not recommend this facility under any circumstance.

In our next category, we gave this facility an F in the category of long-term care. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 97.99331 percent of its patients, which is better than the average nursing home. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than many nursing homes. Sadly, a few of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.

Switching gears to our final category, this nursing home really did not fare well in this area either. Due to a bottom of the barrel grade of F in nursing, this is about as terrible as it gets. The nursing score features a variety of factors. The most important variable is the number of hours nurses spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. This facility fared well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care.