Universal Health Care/Fuquay-Varina

We really were not high on this place's overall score or its category ratings. We gave it a D for inspections and that proved to be its highest grade. Our inspection grades weigh many items found on the facility's recent inspection reports. If you see too many deficiencies on the inspection reports, this is typically the worst sign. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to the well being of residents. This particular facility had 5 deficiencies by CMS. The only positive thing we can say is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that indicate that they caused a risk to resident safety or health. Lastly, we also would like to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home received large government fines recently amounting to more than $100,000. This typically indicates that a facility's bad performance has been an issue for multiple years.

Sadly, this facility only received a D for its long-term care rating, which is actually one of its better category scores. For long-term care residents, the primary goal is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 99.00332 percent of its patients, which is better than most nursing homes. To our surprise, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.

Additionally, we gave this nursing home a rock-bottom F in the category of short-term care. In determining our short-term care scores, we look at the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This rating is frequently a solid measure of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Considering its score in this category, we were not surprised to learn that this facility was well below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its residents based on the data we looked at. The last measure we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.2 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics sunk this nursing home's short-term care grade.

The final area we rated is nursing. This facility was given a bottom of the barrel grade of F in that category. Nursing grades are tied to nurse staffing levels. This facility provided only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. To go along with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this facility also did not fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of patients sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This nursing home had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average facility. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, these metrics pulled down this nursing home's nursing rating significantly.