Atrium Health Huntersville Oaks

In addition to being a strong nursing home overall, it also received A+ government inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these end up being quite insignificant. This nursing home was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

To add to its strong accomplishments in other areas, we gave this facility a score of A for its short-term care score. Short-term care grades are often used to assess a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To provide high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have better levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.8 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Turning to the third area, this nursing home also earned a grade of B+ for its long-term care rating. This is a well above average grade in this area. When nursing homes receive this kind of grade in long-term care it is typically a good sign for resident care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 96.694214 percent of its patients, which is higher than the average nursing home. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Turning to the last category, this facility was given a high-end nursing rating. Although this was not nearly as good as some of its other grades, this is still one of the more favorable grades a facility can receive. Nursing ratings are primarily tied to a facility's nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these areas as predictive indicators of the quality of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.