Etowah Landing

The primary reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it earned an elite inspection score. Its inspection score was far better than its overall score. In our inspections category, we gave it an A. Inspection grades are based on several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this area tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. A couple minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

This facility's next best area turned out to be long-term care. In that area, we gave this facility a B-. For patients looking for a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. After assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination records. We were optimistic to find that this nursing home vaccinated 95.833336 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Finally, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Next we wanted to quickly point out one of this facility's major weaknesses. In the area of nursing care, we gave this nursing home a lowly grade of F. We analyzed the licensure of nurses at the nursing home, as well as the quantity of hours those nurses worked with residents, in determining our grade in this area. With just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident each day, this facility's nurse staffing levels were quite a bit below the national average. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in calculating our nursing grades. This facility performed well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these datapoints to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The final area we looked at was short-term care. It received an F for this area, which is an abysmal grade. This is clearly a significant disappointment. Short-term care grades are generally employed to judge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To provide good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must offer better levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The final metric we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 3.2 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics sunk this nursing home's short-term care grade.