Rockcastle Regional Hospital and Respiratory Care

The main reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it earned an elite inspection score. In fact, its inspection score was far superior to its overall score. In our inspections category, we gave this facility a grade of A+. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection ratings. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively minor. This nursing home received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies to create an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Additionally, we also would like to note that this nursing home was given positive long-term care marks in this assessment. We gave them one of our more impressive scores in this category, with a B. This proved to be the nursing home's second best grade. Facilities that do well in long-term care tend to provide patients with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 96.12756 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is higher than most nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The third most favorable category we awarded this nursing home in any area came in the category of short-term care, where we awarded it a grade of C. Short-term care scores are critical for patients needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires more highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a wide range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last metric we assessed in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is actually below average.

The next category we rated was nursing, which was this nursing home's weakest area. We awarded this facility a grade of D in this category. Naturally, this category pulled down the facility's overall profile a bit. There are many data points included in this category. Most of the factors relate to nurse staffing. This facility offered a meager 0.6 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This statistic is far below the national average. In addition to receiving below average marks for nursing hours, this nursing home was less impressive in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in determining our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of residents suffering pressure ulcers and found that this place was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in this statistic.