Grace Healthcare of Whites Creek

Grace Healthcare of Whites Creek is the sole option we found in Whites Creek, Tennessee. With an overall grade of F, we consider this to be a lower end nursing home. This facility is just about as bad as it gets. More information on this nursing home's category grades may be found below. Its best category is inspections, which is discussed in the next section.

Although we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a B- for our inspections rating. In fact, the facility received very impressive inspection report this year. We believe that one of the most important factors in assessing an inspection report is deficiencies. We especially look at the severity of the deficiencies. Although this place had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, CMS flagged this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. This is not what you want to see. We advise you to direct your search elsewhere.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. In fact, nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that category, we awarded this facility an B-. Nursing grades are tied to levels of nurse staffing. According to CMS records, this facility averaged 3.9 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. Keep in mind that when we calculate our nursing ratings, we apply more weight to hours performed by nurses with a higher level of skill. Lastly, our nursing grades also factor in some quality-focused statistics. Specifically, we look at the percent of residents who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these statistics as good indicators of the quality of nursing care, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

We were also pleasantly surprised to find that this facility received a solid short-term care score in our assessment. We awarded it a grade of C in this area. Our short-term care scores are believed to be more important for patients requiring a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates more skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not only nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. In this nursing home's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the average facility. The last metric we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that just 39.4 percent of this facility's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.

The final category we analyzed is long-term care, which is this facility's weakest area. We gave this facility a grade of D in that area. In a long-term care environment, the primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. One of the statistics we considered on top of nurse's aid hours is vaccines. Fortunately, this facility administered the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this nursing home also fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 1.39 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.