Life Care Center of East Ridge

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Inspection ratings weigh a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better scores in this area tend to have few severe deficiencies. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. This is really what you like to see in this important metric.

This facility was given superb marks in the area of short-term care. For this reason, it was given one of our best scores in that category with a grade of A+. In the area of short-term care, we strive to assess indicators of a facility's rehabilitation services. We assess a facility's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final metric we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients that who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. We found that 6.9 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Our nursing rating looks at the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of skill of those nurses as well as the amount of time spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, 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.

The final category we rated is long-term care, in which this facility received a B-. Even though this wound up being its poorest category score, this is still not a terrible score. Our long-term care grade assesses a facility's personal care instead of the skilled nursing and healthcare services that are critical to a skilled nursing facility. After assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. Unfortunately, this facility vaccinated just 89.28571 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Nevertheless, this place excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.