Blount Memorial Trans Care Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Inspection ratings account for several factors included in a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we rely on is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category typically have very few severe deficiencies. This nursing home was assessed 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered severe. This indicates that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to be an immediate threat to patient safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

Among this nursing home's other accomplishments is its superb short-term care score. We awarded them one of our strongest grades in that category, with a score of A. Our short-term care scores are presumably most critical for patients requiring a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes more highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not just nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final item we assessed in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that 6.3 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

This facility received a very good nursing grade this year as well. It received one of our better scores in that category with a grade of B. Our nursing score considers several datapoints. The most heavily weighted variable is the amount of time nurses spend with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The last area we analyzed is nursing, turned out to be this facility's least impressive area. We awarded this facility a D in that area. This is one of just a couple of dings of a very solid profile. Long-term care scores in this range generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids, as well as the levels of routine medical care available. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. We discovered that this facility provided the vaccine to just 42.5 percent of its residents, which is well below average. To our surprise, this facility actually fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.