Transylvania Regional Hospital

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ short-term care grade. In our short-term care grade, we try to forge a fair measure for rehabilitation. In doing so, we look at the nursing home's level of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return home from this facility. We found that 6.8 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

This facility has received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection scores. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some are relatively minor. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Turning our third category, we gave this nursing home a score of A for our long-term care rating. This is a dominant rating. If you are seeking services other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at long-term care ratings. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. Unfortunately, we were not able to track down information on vaccination rates. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The last area we analyzed is nursing, where this nursing home received a grade of A. This topped off a very favorable report card. Only a select few facilities earned an A- or better in every single category. The nursing score weighs a host of factors. The most heavily weighted variable is the number of hours nurses spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these statistics as reliable measures of the caliber of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.