Knox Center for Long Term Care

In addition to receiving a great overall score, this facility received an A+ for short-term care. In determining our short-term care ratings, we look at a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This area is typically a meaningful measure of a facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last item we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. We found that 6.4 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing rating. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an A-. The nursing rating includes several factors. The most heavily weighted variable is the amount of time nurses spent with patients. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed 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 place the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a system of turning a patient more frequently.

In addition, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with better grades in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This place was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered severe. This means that the inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies to be an immediate threat to patient health or safety. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

The final area we assessed is nursing, was this facility's weakest area. We gave this nursing home a D in this category. This really was one of just a couple of weak points in an otherwise impressive profile. When facilities receive a grade in this range in long-term care it typically means the facility did not perform well in our measures relating to resident care. One of the data points we considered after nursing hours was vaccinations. We were a bit concerned this nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to only 69.30232 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than many nursing homes. This is its best feature in this category.