Pineknoll Rehabilitation Centre

While this nursing home's overall grade was not bad, it really excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our best scores. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the government inspectors did not deem 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.

One of this nursing home's higher category scores came in the area of short-term care. This turned out to be its second most favorable category. In that area, we awarded this facility a B-. Our short-term care grade is often employed to measure a facility's rehabilitation services. To offer quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. We were surprised to find that this nursing home was below average in the two key staffing areas we focus on. The facility offered fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. It is important to determine whether this also correlates to a lower quality of care. The final statistic we considered in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 5.3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is actually below average.

Sadly, this nursing home's third best score is long-term care. As it turns out, with a D in this category, it still performed relatively badly. For long-term care residents, the nursing home's primary objective is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. One of the statistics we considered after nursing hours was vaccines. Thankfully, this nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 96.62921 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.

The last category we rated is nursing, which turned out to be this nursing home's least impressive area. Sadly, it received a lowly F for this area, which is obviously a major disappointment. In computing a nursing home's nursing score, we look at the quantity of hours nurses are seeing patients as well as the level of licensure of those nurses. This particular nursing home averaged just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This figure is quite a bit below average. In addition to rating below average in nursing hours per resident, this facility also had poor marks in the quality-based metrics we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We looked at the percentage of residents sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This nursing home was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in both of these metrics. This is a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are preventable with better nursing care. These metrics helped pull down this facility's nursing rating significantly.