Ringgold Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

Although we didn't rate this nursing home favorably overall, we actually gave it an excellent grade in the category of inspections, where it earned an A-. Arguably the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. It is typically in your best interest to avoid places that had a long list of severe deficiencies. This nursing home was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies to cause an immediate risk to resident safety or health. A few minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

This nursing home's next best category was short-term care. We gave it a grade of C in this category. This is essentially a middle of the pack grade in this area. Short-term care grades are generally employed to measure a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To offer good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. We were surprised to find that this facility was below average in the two key staffing areas we assessed. It provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. It is important to determine whether this also correlates to a lower quality of care. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who who were able to eventually return home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit below average.

Moving on to the category of long-term care, this nursing home received a grade of just D in this area. If you are seeking services other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at long-term care grades. After considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination statistics. We were pleased to learn that this nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Surprisingly, this place was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Sadly, a few of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.

This nursing home's least impressive area was nursing, which is the last category we analyzed. In this category, we gave this nursing home a D. When computing a facility's nursing score, we assess the number of hours nurses are seeing residents and the level of skill of the 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. To pair with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this place also did not fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This facility had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average facility. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, these scores hurt this facility's nursing rating significantly.