Charlottesville Health & Rehabilitation Center

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this facility really excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. Inspection grades are based on many items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category typically have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

In addition, we also wanted to point out that this nursing home was awarded strong short-term care marks in this assessment. We awarded them one of our higher scores in this category, with a B. This turned out to be the nursing home's second strongest score. In determining these short-term care grades, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to devise a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.2 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Sadly, this facility's third best score is long-term care. However, with a grade of D in this category, it still fared relatively poorly. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. We were optimistic to find that this facility vaccinated 99.29578 percent of its residents for pneumonia. To our surprise, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home has less hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.

The final category we assessed is nursing, which proved to be a weak spot for this nursing home. We awarded this facility a grade of just D for our nursing category. In determining our nursing ratings, we analyze both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of the nurses. With only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis, this facility's nurse staffing levels were well below the national average. To go along with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this facility also did not fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and major falls. This place had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average facility. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, these metrics hurt this facility's nursing grade quite a bit.