Nhc Healthcare, Pulaski

On top of receiving a strong overall grade, this facility also excelled in our inspections category, which is based on its recent inspection reports. We gave it an A in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite minor. While this place had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among its many high-end scores, this nursing home was given first-rate short-term care score. In fact, we awarded it a score of A- in that area. Our short-term care scores are based on the nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This includes a broad scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 4.8 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. We looked at the licensure of nurses employed by the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of time those nurses worked with patients, in computing our score in this category. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

In the final category, this facility also was awarded an excellent long-term care rating, with a grade of A-. This completed a straight A report card. Facilities that excel in long-term care tend to provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. 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 less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.