The Waters of Dillsboro-Ross Manor

While this nursing home's overall grade was decent, it really fared well in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our best scores. Inspection ratings are tied to items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this area typically have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This nursing home was hit with 7 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies an immediate risk to resident safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

Another one of this facility's more impressive category grades was in the category of long-term care. In that area, we awarded this facility a B. Facilities that do well in long-term care tend to provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. After we finished assessing the quantity of nursing care, we turned to the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is too frequently a life or death health condition for nursing home residents so we like it when a facility does not take any chances. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Moving on to another strength for this facility, it also received an elite nursing score. In fact, we gave this nursing home an D. Our nursing grade weighs several datapoints, however, the main one is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing scores. This facility fared well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these datapoints to be indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This facility's weakest area is short-term care, which is the final category we scored. We gave it a lowly F in this area. In spite of several solid scores in other areas, this grade is nevertheless disappointing so we wanted to make sure you are aware. In computing our short-term care scores, we assess the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. This area is often a reliable measure of a facility's rehabilitation services. As you might expect, we discovered that this facility provides substantially less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than a typical nursing home. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This was not a strength for this facility. We found that just 4.6 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, around half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.