Signature Healthcare of Trimble County

On top of receiving a great overall grade, this facility also earned top notch health inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our best grades in that category, with an A+. Our inspection scores account for a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better grades in this area usually have very few of these severe deficiencies. This place was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies to be an imminent risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home fared well in the area of long-term care. Indeed, we awarded it a grade of A- for that area, which turns out to be one of our most dominant scores. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in long-term care it is a good sign for patient care and indicates that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. One of the statistics we considered after nursing hours was vaccinations. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a reliable method to avoid unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the aged 65 and up population. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of B-. This wasn't quite as good as some of its other scores, but a grade in this range is not the end of the world. Nursing grades are largely tied to the facility's nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures. Although this nursing home got dinged a bit for nursing hours, it excelled in some of these quality metrics. With fewer than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it fared very well in this statistic. This is often a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving residents more frequently.

Turning to our next area, we awarded this facility a grade of D in our short-term care category. This is the facility's least impressive category grade. Sadly, this grade hurt the facility's overall grade to some degree. In crafting our short-term care grades, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our objective is to devise a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. In this nursing home's case, we found that it provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The last measure we assessed in this area is the number of residents that returned home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 4.7 percent of its residents returning home.