The Woodlands at John Knox Village

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Inspection scores are tied to items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also was given an A+ long-term care grade, making it one of the few nursing homes to receive more than one A+ category scores. Nursing homes that receive this kind of score in this category typically provide consistent around the clock care to make sure patients are well cared for. After we finished assessing the amount of nursing care, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 89.0625 percent of its patients against pneumonia. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we had hoped, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Turning to another strength for this facility, we awarded them one of our stronger scores in our short-term care category as well, with a grade of B+. In calculating our short-term care grades, we look at a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This grade is more often than not a reliable measure of a facility's rehabilitation services. It doesn't look like this nursing home submitted information about its staffing of registered nurses or physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients that eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 5.5 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

The next category we scored was nursing, in which this facility was awarded a B-. This ended up being this nursing home's worst area. This is still not a poor grade. In calculating a facility's nursing grade, we assess the amount of time nurses are seeing residents and the level of licensure of the nurses. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This figure is significantly below average. Finally, our nursing scores also factor in some quality-focused measures. We especially look at the percentage of residents who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. Sometimes these statistics are measures of the quality of nursing care, since superior care tends to reduce these problems.