White Oak Manor - Shelby

While this place's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually didn't perform terribly in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a B- for that category, which is one of our better scores. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite minor. This particular nursing home received 7 deficiencies on its inspection report. We are also concerned by the fact that this facility was flagged by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. We prefer to avoid facilities with this designation. Please do your best to find an alternative nursing home.

We were also surprised to discover that this facility earned a somewhat respectable short-term care rating this year. We awarded it a B- in this area. Our short-term care scores are vital for prospective residents needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a broad range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its level of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. The real question is whether this adversely impacted quality of care. Finally, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

We awarded this facility a grade of just D for our long-term care score. This is not a score to write home about. When facilities receive this kind of score in this category it is often a bad sign for resident care and it may mean that the place is not as well-staffed. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 92.20779 percent of its residents. This is slightly less than we anticipated but still a decent figure. Surprisingly, this place was actually decent at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.

The next area we graded was nursing. This nursing home was given a rock bottom grade of F in that area. The nursing category weighs quite a few factors, most of which are tied to quantities of nurse staffing. This place provided a meager 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. To go along with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this nursing home also did not perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing scores. We looked at the percentage of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and major falls. This facility had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average nursing home. This could be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, these statistics hurt this facility's nursing rating quite a bit.