Knox County Nursing Home District

This place received a very favorable short-term care score. In fact, its short-term care grade proved to be its best category. We gave this them a grade of B. In calculating our short-term care scores, we look at a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. This score is often a reliable assessment of a facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this nursing home submitted registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. The last metric we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

In addition, we gave this nursing home a B in our long-term care category. This happens to be one of our more impressive grades. Nursing homes that do well in this category typically provide patients with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

We also found that this facility has received favorable inspections in recent years. In fact, we awarded it a B- in this category. This is better than many nursing homes in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection grades. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some end up being quite insignificant. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

The next category we analyzed was nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a C. Nursing grades are based largely on quantity of nursing care available. This particular nursing home provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This figure is far below the national average. Finally, we like to look at quality-based statistics, such as the percentage of residents who experienced pressure ulcers and major falls. Sometimes these data points are decent measures of the quality of nursing care.