Signature Healthcare at Kinston

While we graded this facility incredibly poorly overall, it received a fairly respectable nursing grade this year. We gave it a grade of C in that category. We analyzed the qualifications of nurses working for the nursing home, as well as the number of hours the nurses spent with patients, in determining our grade in this category. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures. Although this facility got dinged a bit for nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in some of these quality measures. With less than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it fared remarkably well in this area. This can be an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a system of turning a patient more often.

This facility's next most respectable category is short-term care, but even there it received a grade of just D in that category. This turns out to be a relatively poor score. Our short-term care scores are arguably most meaningful for residents in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing services. This means not only nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Based on its weak grade in this area, we weren't shocked to find this place provides substantially fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most facilities. The last datapoint we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 3.9 percent of its patients returning home. This was well below average.

Unfortunately, this facility didn't receive glowing inspections in recent years. We gave it a grade of just D for our inspections rating. Our inspection scores weigh many items on the facility's recent inspection reports. When you see severe deficiencies on the reports, this is typically the worst sign. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to patient safety. This particular facility was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only positive thing we found is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that suggest they posed a threat to resident safety or health. Lastly, we also would like to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home received significant government fines in recent years totaling over $100,000. This generally indicates that a nursing home's bad track record spanned several years.

The last area we looked at is long-term care, which proved to be this nursing home's worst category. We gave this nursing home a D in this area. For patients in need of a permanent place to live rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. One of the data points we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccines. Fortunately, this facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to 95.833336 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this place was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.04 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.