Cave City Nursing Home

We want to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home really outperformed its overall score in the category of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our best scores in this category with an A-. Arguably the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with better grades in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

This facility also was awarded a favorable grade in our long-term care category. We awarded this facility a better than average grade of B+ in this area. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 85.81081 percent of its residents, which is slightly less than we expected. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home also received a strong nursing grade. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B in that category, which is one of our better scores. The nursing grade weighs quite a few datapoints, most of which are associated with quantities of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The last category we looked at is short-term care. We awarded this facility a grade of D in our short-term care category, leaving this as its worst grade. Short-term care grades are meaningful for residents needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically mandates more skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a broad spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, this place was subpar in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the metrics we assessed. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients that eventually returned home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 3.8 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.