Life Care Center of Elizabethton

We want to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home really outperformed its overall grade in the category of inspections. In fact, it received an excellent inspection report this year. As a result, we gave it one of our highest scores in that category with an A+. Our inspection ratings account for a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher grades in this area tend to have very few severe deficiencies. This place was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This indicates that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to cause an immediate threat to patient safety or health. A couple of minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

In addition, we also wanted to point out that this facility was awarded strong long-term care marks this year. We awarded them one of our better scores in that category, with a grade of B. This turned out to be the facility's second strongest score. Nursing homes that receive this kind of score in long-term care tend to provide consistent around the clock care to ensure residents are kept in good health. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 89.007095 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is a bit below what we anticipated but still a reasonably acceptable figure. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, at least this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Another strength of this nursing home is its favorable grade in nursing. We gave them one of our better scores in that area, with an impressive grade of D. In computing a nursing home's nursing grade, we weigh the amount of time nurses are with residents and the levels of training of those nurses. This facility offered a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This statistic is well below average. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. This facility fared well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these datapoints to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care.

This nursing home's worst area was short-term care, which is the last area we looked at. For this category, we gave this nursing home a D. Our short-term care scores are based on the nursing home's quantity of skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This includes a wide scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. With a score in this range for this category, we weren't shocked to find that this place was well below average in the two key staffing figures we focus on. In fact, it provided substantially fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most other facilities. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 4.8 percent of this facility's patients returned home.