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 6.4 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of C. This facility didn't perform quite as well in this category as it did in some other categories. Nevertheless, this is still a respectable score. Our nursing score considers several datapoints. The most heavily weighted variable is the amount of time nurses spend with residents. This place provides only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a somewhat discouraging figure which is well below average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility excelled in some of the quality measures we assessed. In fact, it performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

The next category we analyzed was long-term care. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F for this category, which is a bottom of the barrel grade. We would not necessarily disqualify a facility as a result of one weak grade though. When nursing homes receive this kind of grade in long-term care it is a bad sign for patient care and it may mean that the facility is not as well-staffed with nurses and aids. One of the data points we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccinations. We were a bit alarmed this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to only 75 percent of its patients. Surprisingly, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than many nursing homes. This is its best feature in this category.