Carolina Pines at Asheville

Even though we graded this nursing home very poorly overall, it received a fairly respectable nursing score this year. We gave it a C in this area. Our nursing grade analyzes the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of licensure of those nurses and the amount of time spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place actually fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. It performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.

As it turns out, this facility only earned a D for its short-term care rating, which is actually one of its more respectable category grades. Our short-term care scores are considered to be most critical for folks in need of a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not merely nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. As you might expect, we discovered that this place offers far less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than a typical facility. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who eventually returned home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.1 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.

This facility received really poor inspections in recent years, causing them to receive a lowly F in our inspection category. An F in this area is generally a signal that we found some red flags on the nursing home's government inspection reports. You should pay close attention to any deficiencies on a nursing home's inspection reports when it receives this poor of an inspection score. We would pay close attention to the severity of those deficiencies. This particular facility had 6 deficiencies by CMS. The only positive thing we found is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that indicate that they created a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, CMS flagged this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. This is not what you want to see. We advise you to direct your search elsewhere.

The final category we analyzed is long-term care. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F for this area, which is a bottom of the barrel grade. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. One of the factors we considered after nursing hours was vaccinations. Thankfully, this facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 96.38554 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.