Hickory Nursing Pavilion

While we were not high on this facility's overall performance, it actually received an impressive inspection report this year with few dings from the applicable government inspectors. As a result, it received one of our better grades in that category with a grade of B+. Inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This place was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This indicates that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

We also awarded this nursing home a middle of the road grade in the area of long-term care, with a C. Our long-term care grades are based on a nursing home's amount of care. This means a broad spectrum of personal care services, ranging from help with activities of daily living to routine medical services. One of the statistics we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours was vaccines. Fortunately, this nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 96.929825 percent of its patients. This nursing home keeps its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Turning to the area of short-term care, this nursing home was given just a D in that area. Our short-term care grades are presumably most important for those needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation typically mandates additional skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Not surprisingly, we found that this place provides significantly less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than a typical nursing home. Lastly, we considered the number of patients that returned home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

The next category we graded was nursing, which turned out to be a weak spot for this nursing home. We awarded this nursing home a D for nursing. The nursing score includes quite a few factors, but the most important one is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home provides 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also looked at a few quality measures in calculating our nursing scores. This place was above average in two of the data points we considered, with solid scores for avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. These statistics are typically reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care offered.