Knox Center for Long Term Care

On top of earning a strong overall grade, this facility also received an elite short-term care grade. We gave them one of our better scores in that area, with an impressive grade of A-. Our short-term care ratings are critical for individuals in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a wide range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

In addition, this nursing home also performed well in our inspection category, which is based on the facility's recent government inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A- for that area. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection grades. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these end up being relatively minor. This nursing home was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This means that the government inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to create an imminent risk to resident safety or health. A few minor deficiencies are not necessarily something to panic about.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B. Our nursing category analyzes a handful of factors, many of which are tied to quantities of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The last area we assessed was long-term care, was this facility's weakest area. We gave this nursing home a grade of D in this category. This really is one of the few dings of a very solid profile. Facilities that do not fare well in long-term care often do not provide as much nursing care and also may be struggling in some of the areas of routine healthcare services we assessed. After considering the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination data. Unfortunately, this nursing home vaccinated a relatively low 71.4876 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Surprisingly, this nursing home actually fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best score in this category.