Diversicare of Oak Ridge

Although this nursing home's overall grade was terrible, it performed pretty well in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a B for that category, which is one of our better scores. Inspection ratings weigh several factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. You generally want to avoid nursing homes with a bunch of severe deficiencies flagged. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

Unfortunately, this facility only earned a grade of D for its short-term care grade, which ended up being one of its better category grades. Short-term care grades are often used to measure a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To provide highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have better levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. With a score in this range for this category, we weren't surprised to discover this nursing home was well below average in several staffing areas we looked at. The facility supplied substantially fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most nursing homes. The final metric we assessed in this area is the number of residents that ultimately returned home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 5.6 percent of its residents returning home. Unfortunately, this was quite a bit below average.

Unfortunately, this facility only received a grade of D for its nursing grade, which was actually one of its better category grades. There are numerous criteria included in this area. Most of the criteria reflect nurse staffing. This place averaged a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing ratings. This place performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care.

The final category we assessed was long-term care, where this nursing home received a very poor grade in this area also. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F in this category, which is obviously very concerning. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means the facility didn't perform well in our quality measures relating to resident care. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. Candidly, we were a bit concerned this nursing home vaccinated 86.59794 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is quite a few points lower than the national average. Surprisingly, this nursing home was actually decent at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.