Accura Healthcare of Knoxville

One of the reasons this proved to be a decent nursing home is that it received a very favorable nursing grade. Its nursing rating is its best category. In that area, we gave this nursing home a B+. Our nursing rating is mostly tied to the facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This nursing home also was awarded a favorable grade in our short-term care category. We gave this facility a better than average grade of B+ in this category. Our short-term care grades are considered to be most critical for people needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation usually mandates higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not only nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final measure we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

This nursing home's inspection rating also was quite a bit better than its overall grade. Due to a strong inspection report this year, it received one of our better scores in that category with a B. Our inspection grades are tied to items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. A few relatively minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

Moving on to the next category, this nursing home received a C in long-term care, which is generally a respectable rating. In calculating our long-term care grades, we look at the assistance with daily living received by the facility's residents. Once we finished looking at the amount of nursing care, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination records. We were pleased to find that this nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. This place also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.