Nhc Healthcare, Cookeville

To go along with a favorable overall score, we awarded this facility a grade of A+ for inspections. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this category typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This facility was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to resident safety or health. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

This nursing home also received a favorable long-term care score. In fact, we awarded it an above average score of B+ in this area. When facilities receive a grade in this range in this category it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. Once we finished looking at the quantity of nursing care, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 99.66102 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly is often a life or death ailment for nursing home patients so we like it when a nursing home does not roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Turning to the next area, this nursing home also received a score of B for its short-term care rating. This is a well above average grade in this category. In the area of short-term care, we try to qualify measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We look at a nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Unfortunately, it does not appear that this facility provided registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. The last measure we considered in this area is the percentage of patients who returned home from the nursing home. We found that 5.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

The last area we graded is nursing, where this nursing home received a B-. While this ended up being its worst category grade, this is still not a terrible score. We weighed the skill-level of nurses working for the nursing home, as well as the quantity of time the nurses were with residents, in computing our score in this category. This place provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, while this facility got dinged a bit for nursing hours per resident, it excelled in a few of our quality-based measures. With less than five percent of its residents experiencing pressure ulcers, it did remarkably well in this statistic.