Alexian Village of Tennessee

On top of receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home also received an A+ inspection score. This is based on the facility's recent government inspections. An A+ in this area is one of the best complements we can pay to a nursing home. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This nursing home was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to be an imminent risk to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

To add to its elite assessments in other areas, we awarded this facility a grade of A for its long-term care score. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary objective 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 residents. One of the criteria we considered after nursing hours was vaccinations. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 89.70588 percent of its residents. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Nursing grades are heavily correlated with quality and quantity of nursing care. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures 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 facility Tennessee in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a policy of moving a resident more frequently.

The next area we assessed was short-term care. This facility was awarded an above average short-term care grade in our assessment, with a grade of B-. Even though this was not nearly as dominant as a few of its other category grades, this is nevertheless a respectable rating for that area. In computing these short-term care grades, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to create a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last datapoint we looked at in this area is the number of residents that were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 3.9 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.