Asbury Place at Maryville

While we gave this facility a terrible overall score, we awarded it a grade of B for our short-term care rating. Our short-term care grades are probably most important for people in need of a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not only nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final statistic we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who eventually returned home from the facility. We found that 5.4 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Remarkably, we awarded this nursing home a grade of C for our nursing rating, which isn't a bad grade. In computing our nursing scores, we look at both staffing levels and the skill levels of those nurses. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility actually excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. In fact, it scored well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the quantity of hours of care offered.

Unfortunately, this facility received an F for its long-term care grade. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. 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 looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 98.783455 percent of its patients, which is higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. To our surprise, this nursing home also keeps its patients out of the hospital. It had just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

The final category we looked at was inspections. This facility did not receive favorable government inspection reports in recent years. In fact, we had to give it an F here. We would advise paying special attention to any deficiencies on a nursing home's inspection reports when it receives this poor of an inspection grade. We would pay close attention to the level of severity of those deficiencies. This particular facility was hit with one category G through L deficiency, which rank among the more serious categories of deficiencies. This generally indicates that the deficiencies found by inspectors had the potential to cause actual harm to residents. Finally, we need to point out that this nursing home was assessed significant government fines amounting to over $100,000. This typically indicates that a nursing home's bad performance spanned more than one year.