Oak Ridge Health and Rehabilitation

We want point out that this nursing home's long-term care score exceeded its overall grade. This nursing home earned a B in this category. For patients seeking a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care grades are an important measure. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination records. It doesn't appear that this nursing home provided information about vaccinations. 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 a remarkably low number.

This facility also received a strong inspection grade. Inspection grades are based on the facility's recent health inspections. We gave this facility an above average grade of B in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be relatively insignificant. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection 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 consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. Our nursing rating consists of a handful of components, however, the most important one is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This place provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Lastly, while this place got dinged a bit for its nursing hours, it excelled in a few of our quality measures. With less than five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it fared well in this metric.

Our next category is short-term care, where we awarded this nursing home a C in that category. Short-term care scores are crucial for residents requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a wide spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, this facility was below average in terms of its number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. The last statistic we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.