Nhc Healthcare, Tullahoma

We also wanted to point out that this facility earned near flawless government inspections recently. We gave them an impressive grade of A+ in this area. These inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

This facility also was elite in the area of short-term care, where it received a score of A. Very few facilities performed better in this area. Short-term care grades are typically used to measure a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have good rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last datapoint we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that 6.1 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. We scrutinized the skill-level of nurses employed by the facility, as well as the quantity of hours the nurses were with residents, in calculating our rating in this category. This nursing home averages 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 nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can typically be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Turning to our fourth area, this nursing home received an extremely favorable long-term care grade. We awarded it a grade of B+ in that category, finishing off one of our finer profiles. When facilities receive this type of grade in long-term care it is typically a good sign for patient care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses and aids. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.