Pine Tree Lodge Nursing Center

To pair with its relatively modest overall grade, we awarded this facility a grade of A- for our inspections rating. This grade is far more impressive than the facility's overall grade. Our inspection grades are tied to many items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this area typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

Additionally, we also would like to point out that this facility was given impressive long-term care marks this year. We gave them one of our more impressive scores in that category, with a grade of B. This turned out to be the nursing home's second best grade. When facilities receive this type of grade in this category it is usually a good sign for patient care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 99.55157 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Finally, this place 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.

The next area we looked at was nursing, where we gave this facility an F. This was definitely one of this facility's major weaknesses. Our nursing rating focuses on the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of training of the nurses and the quantity of hours spent with patients. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing ratings. This facility performed well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.

The final category we rated is short-term care, which is this nursing home's weakest area. It received an abysmal F for this category, which is obviously very concerning. In computing these short-term care grades, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to create a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. With a score in this range for this category, we were not surprised to discover that this facility was below average in many staffing figures we looked at. It provided significantly fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. The last datapoint we looked at in this category is the number of patients that returned home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 5 percent of its residents returning home. Unfortunately, this was well below average.