Lenoir Health Care

Although we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a B- for our inspections rating. In fact, the facility received very impressive inspection report this year. Our inspection grades are based on several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important item to look for on these reports. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to the well being of residents. This nursing home received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

Included in this facility's litany of poor scores was its F in the area of long-term care. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 98.23944 percent of its residents, which is higher than the majority of nursing homes. To our surprise, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Sadly, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.

Tragically, we gave this facility an F for its short-term care grade. In crafting our short-term care ratings, we analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to devise a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Considering its poor grade in this category, we were not shocked to learn that this place offers significantly fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most nursing homes. Lastly, we considered the number of residents that returned home from this nursing home. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.3 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

The final area we graded was nursing, where this nursing home received an abysmal score here as well. Sadly, it received an abysmal F in this category, which is obviously a major disappointment. Our nursing rating is based on a variety of subcategories. The most heavily weighted one is the amount of time nurses spend with patients. This place offered a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. On top of receiving below average marks for nursing hours, this nursing home was less impressive in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in calculating our nursing ratings. We looked at the percent of patients suffering pressure ulcers and found that this place was at roughly 1.5 times the national average in this metric.