Focused Care of Gilmer

This facility's grades are horrible across the board. We especially want to draw your attention to its inspection grade where it received an F. This isn't a good sign for its government inspection reports. When a place has this poor of an inspection score, you should expect some severe deficiencies on its inspection report. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to patient safety. This particular facility was hit with a category G through L deficiency, which rank among the more serious categories of deficiencies. These categories indicate that the deficiencies uncovered by inspectors had potential to pose actual harm to residents. Finally, we need to point out that this facility received significant government fines in recent years amounting to more than $100,000. This often means that a facility's poor track record spanned multiple years.

We also want to note that this nursing home received an F for its short-term care grade. Short-term care grades are critical for prospective residents requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires more skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a vast range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely wasn't a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 4.7 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, about half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.

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 0.01 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.

Moving on to our final category, this nursing home did not perform well in this area either. With a poor grade of F in nursing, this is just about as terrible as it gets. The nursing score considers numerous data points. The most important factor is the quantity of hours nurses spent with patients. This facility offered only 0.1 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. This place performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these data points to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care.