Life Care Center of Athens

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Inspection ratings weigh a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher grades in this category typically have few of these severe deficiencies. This place was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe. This indicates that CMS did not deem any of these deficiencies to be an imminent risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among its many impressive grades, this nursing home was awarded an excellent short-term care grade. In fact, we gave it a score of A in that category. In our short-term care category, we try to create a meaningful gauge for rehabilitation services. In this process, we look at the facility's level of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last datapoint we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients that returned home from the facility. We found that 5.9 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

This facility also received a strong long-term care grade. Indeed, we awarded it an above average score of B+ in this area. When facilities receive this kind of score in long-term care it is typically a good sign for resident care and indicates that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. One of the criteria we considered after nursing hours was vaccinations. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 99.68254 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a proven method to avoid unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the aged 65 and up population. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The next category we assessed was nursing, where this nursing home was awarded a grade of B. While this proved to be its poorest category grade, this is nevertheless an impressive grade. Nursing scores are based largely on quality and quantity of nursing care. This facility provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.