Life Care Center of Waynesville

While this nursing home's overall grade was decent, it really excelled in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our best scores. Our inspection grades account for several factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher scores in this area tend to have very few of these severe deficiencies. This nursing home was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies to be an immediate risk to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to note that this nursing home received a great long-term care score. In fact, we awarded it one of our highest grades in this area with a score of A-. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 99.51923 percent of its residents, which is far higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. 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 number.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of C, which is a decent grade. Our nursing rating looks at the facility's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of licensure of the nurses as well as the number of hours 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. Finally, despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this facility actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is usually a good indicator that a nursing home has sufficient quality controls in place.

Moving on to the fourth category, this nursing home really didn't fare very well. With an abysmal grade of F in short-term care, this was its worst grade. In determining our short-term care ratings, we look at a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. This grade is often a meaningful measure of a facility's rehabilitation services. It looks like this place was below average in the two key staffing areas we focus on. In fact, it supplied fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most other nursing homes. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents that returned home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.2 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.