Erwin Health Care Center

One of the many reasons this ended up being a great nursing home is that it earned a very impressive grade in inspections. In fact, inspections turned out to be its best category. In this category, we gave this nursing home a grade of A. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This place received 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its strong achievements in other areas, we gave this nursing home a grade of A- for its short-term care score. Our short-term care grade is typically used to gauge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide better levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final metric we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

The third category we analyzed was long-term care. Adding to its strong profile, this facility also excelled in that category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of of A- in the area. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in long-term care it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia tragically can be a dangerous illness for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home doesn't take any chances. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The next area we looked at was nursing, in which this facility was awarded a grade of B. Although this is its weakest category rating, this is nevertheless a quality grade. There are several criteria included in this category. Many of these criteria reflect nurse staffing. This facility provided 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 facility 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.