The Sanctuary at Wilmington Place

While this place's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually didn't perform terribly in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B- for that category, which is one of our better scores. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be relatively minor. While this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, 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.

We were also surprised to find that this nursing home earned a reasonably solid short-term care grade this year. We gave it a grade of B- in that category. Our short-term care grade is typically employed to measure a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To provide highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Unfortunately, we found that this facility provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The tricky part is determining what bearing this had on the quality of care. The last statistic we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that just 6.7 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is below average.

Turning to the area of nursing care, this facility received a grade of just D in this category. In computing our nursing ratings, we analyze both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the skill levels of those nurses. This nursing home provided only 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing ratings. This facility performed well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be measures of the quality of nursing care.

The last area we graded is long-term care, which turned out to be this facility's weakest area. We awarded this facility a D in this area. When facilities receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means the nursing home did not perform well in our measures relating to resident care. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 93.02326 percent of its residents. This is a few points below what we expected but still a decent percentage. Surprisingly, this place was actually decent at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best score in this category.