Bethesda Health Care Center

Bethesda Health Care Center is an average-sized nursing home located in Cookeville, Tennessee. We gave this facility an overall grade of B. A grade of this caliber requires solid marks in most areas. You can certainly do much worse than this nursing home. We were also pleased to find that this place didn't have any weak links in any of the major categories. Additional information about these categories can be found below.

On top of receiving a strong overall score, this nursing home fared even better in the area of inspections which is based on the nursing home's recent inspections. We awarded it an A for that area, which is one of our best scores. These inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

Another strong feature for this nursing home is that it was given a favorable long-term care score. In fact, this wound up being its second best category score. In that category, we gave this facility a B. Facilities that do well in long-term care typically provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. After we finished assessing the volume of care provided by nurses, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 99.36508 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is too frequently a dangerous ailment for nursing home residents so we like it when a facility doesn't leave this to chance. Lastly, we looked at its number of hospitalizations. Although it had 2.48 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, its risk adjusted statistic was close to the middle of the pack since it had some more complicated patients.

Turning to another strength for this facility, we gave them one of our more favorable grades in our short-term care category as well, with a grade of B. Our short-term care ratings are critical for people seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires additional highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a vast range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. One reason for this facility's strong score in this category is that it provides a greater volume of physical therapist hours to its residents than the average nursing home. The last datapoint we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that it was respectable in this area with 48.7 percent of its patients returning home.

The next area we scored was nursing. We gave this nursing home a grade of B- in that area. Our nursing rating is based on numerous factors. The most heavily weighted factor is the number of hours nurses spend with patients. This nursing home provides 3.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in some quality-focused statistics. Specifically, we look at the percent of residents who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these areas as reliable measures of the quality of nursing care, since better care tends to reduce these problems.