Dickson Health and Rehab

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this facility really excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection ratings. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively minor. This place was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered severe. This means that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

This facility also performed well in the category of long-term care, with an elite grade of A- in this category. Nursing homes that receive this type of grade in this category tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure patients are kept in good health. One of the statistics we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccinations. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccination to 90.95745 percent of its residents. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

In addition, we gave this nursing home a rock-bottom F in the category of short-term care. Our short-term care scores are arguably most meaningful for folks in need of rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Not surprisingly, we discovered that this nursing home offers far less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the typical nursing home. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that just 5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

The final area we scored is nursing. Unfortunately, we gave it an F in this area, which is a very poor score. This is certainly a major disappointment. The nursing score assesses many subcategories, most of which are tied to nursing hours. This nursing home averaged just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is an alarmingly low total. To pair with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this facility also did not fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing ratings. We looked at the percent of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and major falls. This place had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average nursing home. This could be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are preventable with better nursing care. These scores pulled down this nursing home's nursing rating significantly.