Grace Healthcare of Abingdon

Although this nursing home's overall grade was not a highlight, it actually received a very good grade in the area of inspections. We gave it a B+ for that area, which is one of our better scores. Inspection ratings are based on datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important thing to look for on these reports. Most importantly, you should avoid nursing homes that have severe deficiencies linked to risks to resident well being. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

This nursing home also was awarded a positive grade in our long-term care category. We awarded this nursing home a better than average grade of B in that category. For residents seeking a permanent residence rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 31.872509 percent of its patients, which is slightly below what we were hoping for. This place was also able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 1.32 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days.

Turning to the area of nursing care, this facility received a grade of just D in this category. When determining our nursing scores, we factor in both nursing hours and the training levels of the nurses. This place provided a meager 3.1 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. In addition to receiving below average scores for total nursing hours, this nursing home was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in determining our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of residents suffering pressure ulcers and found that this nursing home was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in this metric. This is a bad sign when you consider that so many bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, this statistic really dragged down this facility's nursing grade substantially.

Switching gears to our final category, this facility really did not fare well in this category either. Due to a poor grade of F in short-term care, this is about as terrible as it gets. Our short-term care scores are likely most critical for patients in need of a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates additional skilled nursing. This means not merely nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other types of therapy. As you might expect, we found that this place provides substantially less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than a typical nursing home. Lastly, we assessed 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 34.8 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.