Pruitthealth-Union Pointe

Pruitthealth-Union Pointe is an average-sized nursing home located in Monroe, North Carolina. Featuring an overall score of B-, this looks like a decent nursing home. Based on our assessment, there are certainly far worse nursing homes out there. One of the best aspects of this facility's profile is its remarkable inspection reports, which we will address in the next section.

While this facility'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 highest scores. Arguably the most significant factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This place was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to patient health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

This facility also performed well in the area of short-term care, where we awarded it a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to gauge a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to provide quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer better levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Remarkably, this facility offers its residents at least one and a half times as many physical therapist hours per week than the average nursing home. The last datapoint we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents that ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that it fared better than most facilities in this area with 55.7 percent of its residents returning home. With most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return home.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of C. Nursing grades are based largely on nurse staffing levels. This nursing home provides 3.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, this place was relatively weak in two of the datapoints we focus on, with subpar scores for minimizing its patients' pressure ulcers and major falls.

The last area we looked at was long-term care, which turned out to be this facility's worst area. We gave this nursing home a D in that category. Of course, this score hurt the nursing home's overall profile a bit. For prospective patients looking for a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care grades are a key measure. On top of considering the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is more than most nursing homes. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 1.4 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Sadly, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.