Life Care Center of Sparta

Life Care Center of Sparta is an average-sized facility located in Sparta, Tennessee. This nursing home was awarded an overall grade of B+, which is very favorable score. Based on our ratings, this place looks like a good fit for most people. This place was better in some categories than others, but it did not have any bad scores in any of the major categories discussed below. More information about these categories can be found below.

In addition to faring well overall, this facility earned a nearly flawless inspection report. Therefore, it earned one of our best scores in that area with an A+. Arguably the most important factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it received a dominant long-term care grade. Indeed, long-term care turned out to be its second most impressive category grade. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a score of A. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in this category it is typically a good sign for resident care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 99.05213 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. Finally, we looked at the nursing home's number of hospitalizations. With 1.75 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home was just about middle of the pack in this area.

Additionally, this facility also received favorable short-term care scores in our assessment. In fact, we awarded it one of our higher grades in that area, with a score of B. In determining our short-term care scores, we size up a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other types of therapists. This area is often a solid assessment of the nursing home's rehabilitation services. One of this nursing home's strengths is physical therapy hours. We found that it offers more hours with physical therapists to its residents than most facilities. The final datapoint we assessed in this category is the number of patients that eventually returned home from the facility. We found that it performed as well as just about any nursing home in Tennessee in this area with 57.8 percent of its residents returning home. For most facilities, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return home.

The final category we rated is nursing, in which this nursing home received a grade of C. While this ended up being its worst category rating, this is nevertheless not a major area of concern. When calculating a facility's nursing score, we consider the quantity of hours nurses are seeing patients as well as the skill levels of the nurses. This nursing home provides 3.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also considered some quality-based measures. This place performed well in a few of the quality measures we looked at. For example, in terms of the number of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, this facility performed better than the national average. This is generally a good indicator that a facility has sufficient quality controls in place. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented with better nursing care.