Accordius Health at Gastonia

The primary reason this nursing home received a decent overall grade is its impeccable government inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our better scores in that category, with a grade of A-. This is a much better grade than the place's overall grade, which was decent but certainly not elite. Inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

One of this facility's more respectable category scores was in the area of short-term care. This turned out to be its second most favorable category. In that area, we gave this facility a B-. Our short-term care grades are believed to be more critical for patients requiring a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates additional skilled nursing services. This means not merely nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last metric we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 5.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This nursing home's next best category was its long-term care grade, where it was given a grade of B-. Long-term care scores are critical for individuals looking for non-healthcare services such as personal care. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We discovered that this nursing home provided the vaccine to just 75.18519 percent of its patients, which is not a very encouraging sign. Nevertheless, this facility excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The next category we scored is nursing. This facility was given a grade of C in this area. The nursing score considers many subcategories. The most heavily weighted one is the number of hours nurses spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, our nursing grades also factor in some quality-focused measures. We especially like to look at the percentage of residents who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. Sometimes these statistics are decent indicators of the quality of nursing care, since superior care tends to reduce these problems.