Accura Healthcare of Cherokee

In addition to faring well overall, this nursing home also earned a nearly flawless inspection report. Consequently, it received one of our highest scores in that area with an A+. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection grades. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are quite insignificant. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This tells you that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A. Our nursing rating is largely tied to a nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving residents at least once a day.

Turning to another strength for this facility, we gave them one of our better scores in our short-term care category as well, with a grade of B+. Short-term care scores are based on a facility's quantity of highly-skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a broad range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

The final category we rated was long-term care, where this nursing home was given a grade of B. Believe it or not, this turned out to be this facility's weakest category. A facility could be doing a lot worse when it's weakest grade still beats out most other nursing homes. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.