Nhc Healthcare, Kingsport

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Our inspection grades are based on pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this category typically have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. It does not appear that we were able to find information about this nursing home's deficiencies. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this nursing home excelled in our long-term care category. We awarded them a dominant grade of A+ in this area. Facilities that excel in this category typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to assessing the well above average volume of care provided by nurses and other staff at this nursing home, we also were pleased by the nursing home's record for vaccinations. For example, this nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Moving on our next area, this facility was awarded first-rate short-term care grade. In fact, we gave it a score of A in that category. Our short-term care ratings are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This includes a vast spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, in addition to other variations of therapy. This nursing home excelled in the two key staffing areas we looked at. It offered more care from registered nurses and physical therapists than the average nursing home. This is generally a very favorable sign. The last statistic we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it performed as well as just about any facility in Tennessee in this area with 70.2 percent of its residents returning home. Unfortunately, at most facilities, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

In the final category we analyzed, this facility was given a very strong grade of B+ in our nursing category. With this score, the nursing home completed a very strong profile. There are a number of criteria within this category. Most of the data points are tied to the quantity of nurse staffing. This nursing home provided 4.6 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This was one of the more impressive figures we found. In addition, we found that a significant percentage of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. These are both really impressive figures. On top of providing high levels of nursing care, this place also excelled in several of the quality measures we looked at. With less than 5 percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it fared as well as any place the country in this category.