Hermitage Health Center

In addition to being a strong facility overall, it also received A+ inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Arguably the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with better scores in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing score. Nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an A-. Our nursing grade is mostly tied to a facility's nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility Tennessee in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a policy of moving residents more frequently.

This nursing home received an impressive short-term care grade as well. We awarded it one of our better scores in that category with a score of B+. Short-term care scores are meaningful for residents seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires higher levels of skilled nursing services. This means a wide range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.2 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Switching gears to the final area, this facility was given a respectable long-term care score. Although this is not as impressive as a few of its other scores, this is still not a major area of concern. Our long-term care grade is often used to judge a facility's performance as a traditional convalescent home, as opposed to focusing on the skilled nursing services provided by a skilled nursing facility. After considering the quantity of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination record. We were pleased to discover that this facility vaccinates 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Finally, this nursing home was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.