Pruitthealth-Durham

Even though we graded this nursing home incredibly poorly overall, it received a decent short-term care grade this year. We gave it a C in that area, which was the closest thing to a bright spot we can find for this nursing home. In computing our short-term care grades, we look at the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This score is often a solid measure of a facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. We were surprised to find that this facility was below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. In fact, it offered fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. It is important to determine whether this also correlates to a lower quality of care. The last datapoint we assessed in this category is the number of residents that eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 5.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. This figure was below average.

This nursing home really didn't perform horribly in the area of inspections. We gave it a grade of C for that category. Other categories were the source of this facility's rock bottom overall score. Our inspection grades account for a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. To our surprise, this nursing home was hit with a category J through K deficiency, which are some of the worst possible categories of deficiencies. This usually tells you CMS identified a deficiency which placed resident health or safety in imminent danger. Another red flag is that CMS cited this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. Hopefully, its performance improves in the future, but until then we simply can't recommend this facility.

Tragically, this facility received an F for its long-term care grade. When facilities receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means the nursing home didn't perform well in our quality measures relating to resident care. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. As it turns out, this facility administered the vaccine to a relatively low 59.797295 percent of its residents, which is not a very encouraging sign. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than many nursing homes. This was its best score in this category.

The next category we looked at is nursing. This nursing home received an abysmal grade of F in this category. Nursing ratings are based largely on quantity of nursing care available. This place offered a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This number is quite a bit below the national average. On top of 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 patients experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This facility was at roughly 1.5 times the national average in both of these data points. This is a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. These statistics helped pull down this nursing home's nursing grade significantly.