Ascension Saint Thomas Hickman

One of the reasons this turned out to be a strong facility is that it earned an impressive inspection rating. In fact, inspections is its best category. In this category, we gave this facility an A. Inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

This nursing home performed well in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Our nursing rating is largely based on a nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the nation 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 having a policy of moving a resident more frequently.

This facility is also strong in the category of short-term care, where it was given a grade of B. It outperformed most nursing homes in this category. In calculating our short-term care scores, we scrutinize the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. This area is more often than not a useful assessment of a facility's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients that eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The final category we assessed is long-term care, where this facility was given a B. This nursing home proved to be relatively strong in all areas we analyzed. When nursing homes receive this type of score in this category it is usually a good sign for resident care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses aids. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 97.72727 percent of its residents, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly can be a dangerous ailment for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home doesn't take any chances. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.