Golden Living Center-Knox

The main reason this nursing home received a decent overall score is its excellent health inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our higher grades in that category, with a grade of A+. This is a much better score than the place's overall grade, which was decent but certainly not elite. Our inspection grades are tied to several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this area have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This place received 8 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered severe. This means that CMS didn't deem any of these deficiencies an immediate risk to resident safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

We also awarded this nursing home a middle of the pack grade in the area of short-term care, where we gave it a grade of B-. Short-term care grades are commonly used to measure a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to offer highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final item we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that just 5 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is actually below average.

This nursing home's nursing grade appears to be one of its better features. The facility received a grade of C in this category. When determining our nursing grades, we look at both nursing hours and the training levels of those nurses. This place averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily, which is not an impressive total. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. It performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.

The last category we graded was long-term care, is this nursing home's least impressive area. We awarded this facility a D in that category. This really is one of just a few dings of an otherwise strong profile. For prospective patients in need of a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care grades are very important. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is higher than the majority of nursing homes. To our surprise, this facility was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.