Ahava Healthcare of Clarksville

To pair with its relatively modest overall score, we gave this nursing home an A+ for our inspections rating. This is far better than the facility's overall score. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection ratings. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being quite insignificant. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

This nursing home also received a favorable grade in our long-term care category. We awarded this facility a better than average grade of B in that area. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 93.89831 percent of its residents. This is slightly less than we expected but still a respectable figure. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility's second least favorable category is short-term care, where it earned just a D in that category. This is a relatively poor score. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to judge a nursing home's rehabilitation services To provide highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide better levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The final statistic we considered in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 5.2 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics was damning for this facility's short-term care grade.

Turning to our next category, this facility really didn't fare well. With a bottom of the barrel grade of F in nursing, this is this nursing home's weakest grade. The nursing score is based on a host of data points. The most important one is the number of hours nurses spent with residents. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. This nursing home also had terrible scores in several of the quality-based measures to pair with its low nursing hour totals. We looked at the percentage of patients experiencing pressure ulcers. This facility was at more than double the national average in this datapoint. This is quite alarming when you consider that many pressure ulcers are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the facility's fate of receiving a very weak nursing rating.