White Oak of Waxhaw

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are quite insignificant. This place received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies an imminent risk to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also awarded this facility a score of A- for our long-term care score. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 99.28571 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Additionally, this facility also was given favorable short-term care scores this year. Indeed, we awarded them one of our more favorable grades in that area, with a grade of B. Our short-term care ratings are presumably more important for patients needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not only nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, we weren't able to locate information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. The final item we considered in this category is the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 5.7 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

The last area we assessed was nursing, turned out to be this facility's weakest area. We awarded this nursing home a grade of D in this area. This is one of just a couple of dings in an otherwise impressive profile. Our nursing rating analyzes quite a few components, but the most important consideration is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. With just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day, this facility's nurse staffing levels were far below the national average. Unfortunately, this place also didn't perform as well as we hoped in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed for this category.