Litchford Falls Healthcare

Litchford Falls Healthcare is an average-sized nursing home located in Raleigh, North Carolina. We gave it an overall grade of C, which is a middle of the road rating. This grade is not too far off the city grade for Raleigh, which is a B-. One of the major highlights of this facility's report card is its stellar inspection grade, which you can find in the next section.

While this nursing home's overall grade was decent, it really fared well in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A+ for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Our inspection ratings are based on several items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this category have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This place received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This means that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies to create an immediate risk to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

The next highest area we awarded this facility in any area came in the area of short-term care, where we gave it a B-. Our short-term care grades are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a broad range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other forms of therapy. One of this nursing home's strengths is physical therapy hours. We found that it offers at least 50% more hours with physical therapists to its residents than most other facilities. Finally, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that it outperformed the majority of nursing homes with 54.1 percent of its patients returning home. This is a better rate than most facilities.

This nursing home's third most favorable category is its long-term care score, where it received a grade of C. For prospective residents in need of a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. Once we finished looking at the volume of care provided by nurses, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. We were pleased to learn that this facility vaccinated 94.57627 percent of its residents for pneumonia. The last statistic we looked at was the facility's hospitalization rate. Although it had 2.28 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, its risk adjusted statistic was not too bad.

This facility's worst area was nursing, which is the last category we scored. Sadly, it received an abysmal F in this area. Despite some solid grades in other areas, this grade is nevertheless disappointing so we would like to to point it out. Nursing scores are largely tied to the nursing home's nurse staffing. This facility provided 3.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is below the national average. To go along with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this facility also didn't fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of patients experiencing pressure ulcers and major falls. This facility had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average facility. This could be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are preventable with better nursing care. These statistics pulled down this nursing home's nursing grade significantly.