Focused Care of Gilmer

Neither this facility's overall grade nor its category scores gave us anything positive to point out. Its best area was short-term care, but even there it received a D. This is still a well below average grade. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to judge a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to provide highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. With a score of this caliber for this area, we weren't surprised to learn that this nursing home was well below average in many staffing figures we assess. In fact, it offered substantially fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. Finally, we considered the number of residents who returned home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.

This nursing home really excelled in the area of nursing, where it received an D. Nursing scores are primarily based on the nursing home's nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing ratings. This nursing home performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these metrics to be indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Another issue was the F this facility was given in the area of long-term care. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Thankfully, this facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients, which is an above average statistic. Surprisingly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Sadly, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

The final category we assessed was inspections. Unfortunately, this nursing home didn't receive glowing inspections in recent years. As a result, we had to give it an F. We would advise paying close attention to any deficiencies on a facility's inspection reports when it receives this poor of an inspection score. We suggest you pay close attention to the severity of the deficiencies. This particular nursing home was hit with one category G through L deficiency, which rank among the more severe deficiencies. This generally indicates that the deficiencies identified by CMS had the potential to pose actual harm to patients. On top of having severe deficiencies, this facility was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. We would not recommend this facility under any circumstance.