Chapel Hill Community

One of the reasons this ended up being a decent facility is it earned a very favorable inspection grade. In this area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B+. Inspection grades are based on pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor dings are not the end of the world.

In addition, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B in our short-term care category. This happens to be one of our more favorable scores. Short-term care grades are often used to grade a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To have quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents that ultimately returned home from this nursing home. We found that 5.6 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home in any area came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of C. Nursing grades are primarily associated with the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This facility averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day, which is a very low figure. Lastly, nursing ratings also consider quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this place actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is often a reliable indicator that a facility has sufficient quality controls in place. Many falls can be avoided if a facility provides enough nurses to assist its patients.

The next area we analyzed was long-term care. We awarded this facility a C in that area. In the category of long-term care, we look at the amount of care provided by a facility, rather than more medically-intensive services. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 95.491806 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is more than the vast majority of nursing homes. Finally, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.