Piney Forest Health and Rehabilitation Center

Although we didn't grade this nursing home favorably overall, we actually gave it an excellent grade in the category of inspections, where it earned an A-. Our inspection scores weigh several factors found on a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. You should avoid facilities with a list of deficiencies flagged. This facility received 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered severe. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of these deficiencies to create an imminent risk to resident safety or health. A few minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

Moving on to the category of short-term care, this nursing home was given just a D in this category. Unfortunately, this wound up being one of its best areas. Short-term care scores are important for people looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires more skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a vast range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. With a score of this caliber in this area, we weren't stunned to learn this nursing home was below average in several staffing figures we focus on. In fact, it provided significantly fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. The last item we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.4 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar metrics sunk this facility's short-term care grade.

Unfortunately, this nursing home's third best category was long-term care. Nevertheless, with a grade of D in this area, it still fared somewhat poorly. For prospective patients in need of a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. Once we finished looking at the quantity of nursing care, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. We were optimistic to learn that this facility vaccinated 99.5098 percent of its patients against pneumonia. To our surprise, this facility also fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.

The last category we graded is nursing. It received an F in this category, which is a bottom of the barrel grade. There are a number of factors within this grade. Most of the factors relate to the quantity of nurse staffing. This place averaged just 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 low 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 computing our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and major falls. This nursing home 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 statistics pulled down this facility's nursing grade quite a bit.