Pine Grove Healthcare Center

The primary reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it earned an excellent inspection score. In fact, its inspection score was far superior to its overall grade. In our inspections category, we gave it an A+. Inspection ratings are tied to many datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this category typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this facility had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

One of this facility's more respectable category grades was in the area of long-term care. This turned out to be its second most favorable category. In that area, we gave this facility a C. Our long-term care grade is commonly used to measure a facility's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services offered by a skilled nursing facility. Once we concluded our assessment of the amount of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination records. We were optimistic to find that this facility vaccinates 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Finally, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Sadly, this facility only earned a grade of D for its short-term care score, which is well below average in this category. In computing our short-term care scores, we scrutinize the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This area is frequently a fair measure of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. Not surprisingly, we learned that this place provides far less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than the typical facility. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who were able to return 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 patients were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.

The next area we assessed was nursing, which ended up being this nursing home's least impressive category. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F for this area, which is clearly concerning. Our nursing rating analyzes the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of licensure of the nurses and the quantity of hours spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.3 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-based metrics in computing our nursing scores. This place was above average in two of the major areas we considered, with good marks for avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.