Claiborne County Senior Care

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. These inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. 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 is also strong in the category of long-term care, where it was awarded a grade of B+. It performed better than most facilities in this category. For patients looking for a permanent place to live rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are very important. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 92.69231 percent of its patients, which is slightly lower than we anticipated. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B-. This wasn't quite on par with some of its other category grades mentioned above. When computing our nursing scores, we analyze both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the skill levels of the nurses. This place provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a much lower figure than we were hoping for. Lastly, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics. Although this nursing home got docked a bit for nursing hours per resident, it excelled in a few of these quality metrics. With less than five percent of its patients experiencing pressure ulcers, it performed very well in this statistic. This is often a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of moving residents more often.

Switching gears to our next category, we awarded this facility a grade of D in the area of short-term care. This is the facility's weakest category score. Unfortunately, this score hurt the nursing home's overall grade to some degree. In calculating our short-term care grades, we size up the facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This score is typically a meaningful measure of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most other facilities. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who eventually returned home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 2.3 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.