Nhc Healthcare, Sequatchie

In addition to faring well overall, this facility also earned nearly flawless government inspections. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with an A+. Inspection scores are tied to datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this area tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This means that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also was given an A+ long-term care grade, rendering it one of the few facilities to be awarded multiple A+ category scores. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Compounding its strong resume, this nursing home also was given a strong short-term care score, with a score of A. Short-term care scores are based in part on a facility's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a wide range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, in addition to other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 6.3 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

In our last category, we awarded this nursing home a A+ for our nursing score. This rounded out an elite report card. We scrutinized the qualifications of nurses employed by the facility, as well as the number of hours those nurses spent with residents, in calculating our rating in this category. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these statistics as good measures of the caliber of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.