Pinehurst Healthcare & Rehab

Although this place's overall score was not a highlight, it actually received a very good grade in the category of inspections. We gave it a grade of B for that area, which is one of our better grades. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. It is generally best to avoid facilities that had a long list of deficiencies. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This means that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

This nursing home's next highest area is its long-term care grade, where it received a grade of B-. For residents in need of a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 99.4012 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is better than most nursing homes. Finally, this nursing home was also able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home's third most favorable category is short-term care. We gave it a C in this category. This is essentially a middle of the road grade in this area. Our short-term care grade is typically used to grade a nursing home's rehabilitation services To have highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. We were surprised to find that this nursing home was below average in the two key staffing areas we focus on. It supplied fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. It is still important to determine whether this also correlates to a lower quality of care. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 4.9 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

The next category we analyzed is nursing, in which this nursing home received a poor score in this area also. We gave it a lowly F in this category, which is obviously a major concern. When calculating our nursing grades, we weigh both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the training levels of those nurses. This facility provided a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. To pair with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this facility also did not fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. We looked at the percentage of patients experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This place had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average nursing home. This could be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are preventable with better nursing care. These metrics hurt this facility's nursing grade quite a bit.