Peachtree Centre

The primary reason this nursing home received a decent overall score is its impeccable health inspections in recent years. We gave it one of our better grades in that category, with an A. This is a much better grade than the place's overall score, which was decent but not in the elite range. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection ratings. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are quite insignificant. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

In addition, we also would like to point out that this nursing home was given positive long-term care marks in this assessment. We gave them one of our more impressive grades in this category, with a grade of B+. This proved to be the nursing home's second best grade. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 99.39024 percent of its patients, which is much higher than the average nursing home. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

One of this facility's better category grades was in the area of nursing care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of C. In determining our nursing grades, we assess both staffing levels and the levels of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics. Although this place got docked a bit for its nursing hours, it excelled in a few of these quality-based measures. With fewer than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it fared well in this metric. This can be a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a system of turning patients more often.

The final category we rated was short-term care, which ended up being this facility's worst category. We gave it an abysmal F in this category, which is certainly very concerning. Our short-term care grades are considered to be more meaningful for residents needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation usually requires more skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. It appears that this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its patients based on the staffing figures we assessed. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients that were able to return home from this nursing home. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.