Life Care Center of Athens

In addition to faring well overall, this nursing home received a nearly flawless inspection report. Therefore, it received one of our highest grades in that category with an A+. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection scores. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be quite insignificant. This place was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies to be an imminent threat to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to point out the fact that this nursing home was given an elite score of A in our short-term care category. In computing our short-term care ratings, we assess a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This grade is generally a meaningful assessment of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who ultimately returned home from this facility. We found that 6.1 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

This facility is also above average in the category of long-term care, where it was given a score of B+. It outperformed most facilities in this category. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. After considering the quantity of nursing care, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 96.46302 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly can be a life or death illness for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home does not leave this to chance. Lastly, this facility 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.

Switching gears to our next area, this nursing home was given a strong nursing grade. While this is not as dominant as a few of its other scores, this is nevertheless one of our more impressive grades we offer. Our nursing score is based on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of licensure of the nurses as well as the amount of time spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these data points as reliable measures of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.