Carolina Pines at Asheville

Carolina Pines at Asheville is an average-sized facility located in Asheville, North Carolina. We awarded this facility an overall grade of C. A grade in this range requires some respectable marks. Asheville received a city grade of B+, so there are other options in the city worth looking at. This place did not excel in every category we looked at, but it did not receive any rock-bottom grades either. Additional information about these categories is available below.

We want to point out that this nursing home outperformed its overall grade in the category of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, we gave it one of our highest grades in this area with an A+. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection ratings. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively insignificant. This facility was assessed 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This means that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent threat to resident safety or health. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

Another one of this nursing home's more impressive category grades was in the category of short-term care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of B. It actually outpaced most facilities in this category. Our short-term care grade is typically employed to measure a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to have highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to feature higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, this nursing home offers both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities offer both. The final metric we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that it fared as well as just about any facility in North Carolina with 58.7 percent of its residents returning home. With most nursing homes, less than half of their short-term patients are able to return home.

The next area we assessed was long-term care, where this facility was awarded a grade of C in this category. Our long-term care ratings are more critical for people needing more conventional services related to personal care. After assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 97.09677 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is higher than the average nursing home. Lastly, we looked at the nursing home's number of hospitalizations. Here we found that this nursing home had 2.19 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, this figure was less favorable than its other scores in the long-term care area.

Switching gears to our fourth area, we gave this facility a D in nursing. This was the facility's least impressive category rating. We looked at the skill-level of nurses at the facility, as well as the quantity of hours the nurses spent with patients, in determining our rating in this area. This nursing home provides 3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. In addition to receiving below average marks for total nursing hours, this facility was less impressive in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in determining our nursing ratings. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and found that this facility was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in this metric.