Chatuge Regional Nursing Home

One of the reasons this turned out to be a strong facility is that it received an impressive inspection score. In fact, inspections turned out to be its best category grade. In this category, we awarded it an A+. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite insignificant. While this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This means that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few relatively minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

Another quality feature for this nursing home is that it was awarded an impressive long-term care score. In fact, this proved to be its second best category score. In this area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B+. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care tend to provide residents with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. Once we assessed the quantity of nursing care, we turned to the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia tragically can be a life threatening health condition for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Adding to its profile, this facility also earned a grade of B for its nursing rating. This is a well above average score in this category. When calculating a nursing home's nursing score, we consider the quantity of hours nurses are caring for residents and the levels of training of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home Georgia in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a system of moving patients even once per day.

The next area we analyzed was short-term care, was this nursing home's weakest category. We awarded this facility a D in this area. This really is one of the couple of dings of an otherwise impressive profile. Our short-term care grade is generally used to gauge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To offer highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to offer higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. It looks like this nursing home was below average in many staffing metrics we focus on. It provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most facilities. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients that ultimately returned home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 2.3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.