The Oaks

The Oaks is located in Winston Salem, North Carolina. The city has several options. This is a subpar facility, with an overall grade of D. Winston Salem received a city grade of B, so there are other options in the city worth looking at. More information on this facility's category grades is available below. Its best category is short-term care, which is addressed in the next paragraph.

Although we were not high on this nursing home overall, we awarded it a B+ for our short-term care rating. This is far more impressive than its overall grade. Without this grade, its profile would have been even worse. In forming these short-term care grades, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to devise a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. When we looked at this facility's physical therapist hours, we found it offered more hours of physical therapy per day to its residents than most nursing homes. The final statistic we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it performed as well as just about any facility in North Carolina in this area with 71 percent of its residents returning home. Unfortunately, at most facilities, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

Another strength for this facility is its impeccable government inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our better grades in that area, with an B+. Our inspection grades are based on several datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important item to look for on these reports. Most importantly, you should avoid nursing homes that have severe deficiencies linked to endangerment of patients. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

Another unfortunate development is the F this facility was given in the category of long-term care. For prospective residents seeking a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 99.717514 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is better than the majority of nursing homes. Surprisingly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home has less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

The last category we rated is nursing. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F in this area, which is a poor grade. Our nursing rating is primarily tied to the nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home averaged a meager 2.8 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This figure is significantly below the national average. To pair with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this place also did not perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing grades. We looked at the percentage of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and major falls. This place had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average nursing home.