White Oak Manor

While this nursing home's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually really excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Our inspection ratings weigh several factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. You should avoid facilities with too many deficiencies flagged. This place was assessed 7 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe. This indicates that CMS did not deem any of these deficiencies an imminent threat to resident health or safety. A few minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

Included in this nursing home's litany of low-end scores was its F in the category of short-term care. In forming these short-term care ratings, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The goal is to devise a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Given its score in this category, we weren't surprised to learn that this place is well below average in terms of the quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

The next category we assessed was long-term care. This facility's was given a bottom of the barrel long-term care grade where it received a lowly F. Nursing homes that don't score well in long-term care often don't provide as much nursing care and also may be lagging in some of the areas of routine medical care we assessed. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 80.17241 percent of its patients. This is multiple points lower than what we expected. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually decent at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best score in this category.

Switching gears to the fourth area, this facility didn't perform well in this area either. With a rock bottom grade of F in nursing, this is really as as uninspiring as it gets. Our nursing score includes a variety of factors. The most important variable is the amount of time nurses spent with patients. With a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, this nursing home's nurse staffing levels were well below the national average. On top of being below average in nursing hours per resident, this facility also had poor marks in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. We looked at the percentage of residents sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This facility was at about 1.5 times the national average in both of these statistics. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are preventable with better nursing care. These metrics helped pull down this nursing home's nursing rating quite a bit.