Colonial Poplin Nursing Home

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Our inspection grades are tied to items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this category have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among its many elite scores, this facility received an excellent long-term care score. In fact, it received a score of A- in this category. When facilities receive this kind of grade in this category it is a good sign for patient care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility received a very good nursing grade this year as well. It received one of our better scores in that category with a grade of B+. In computing a facility's nursing grade, we weigh the amount of time nurses are seeing residents and the level of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

In our final category, we awarded this facility a A+ for its short-term care grade. This finished off an elite report card. Our short-term care grades are critical for prospective residents seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes more skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a vast range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.