The Forest at Duke

In addition to being a quality nursing home overall, this place also excelled in our inspections category, where it earned an A+. Not many facilities performed better in this category. Our inspection ratings are tied to many pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this area have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This place was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies an immediate threat to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

An additional strong feature for this facility is that it was awarded an impressive long-term care grade. Indeed, this turned out to be its second best category score. In this category, we awarded this facility a grade of B+. For long-term care residents, the primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. This facility seems like a viable starting point if you're searching for a permanent place to reside.

Turning to an additional strength for this facility, we awarded them one of our more favorable scores in our short-term care category as well, with a grade of B. Our short-term care ratings are crucial for individuals in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates additional highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a vast range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. We weren't able to track down information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The last statistic we assessed in this category is the number of residents that were able to return home from the facility. We found that 6.8 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Turning to the next area, this nursing home really did not fare very well. With a rock bottom grade of F in nursing, this is clearly its poorest category. Our nursing grade consists of a handful of subcategories, but the paramount one is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provided just 0.2 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is an alarmingly low total. Lastly, to round out our nursing grade, we turn to some quality-focused statistics in rounding out our nursing scores. Specifically, we look at the percent of residents who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these statistics as predictive indicators of the quality of nursing care, since better care tends to reduce these problems.