Summit View of Rocky Top

While this nursing home's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually didn't perform terribly in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a B- for that category, which is one of our better scores. We believe that one of the most important factors in assessing an inspection report is deficiencies. In this regard, we especially focus on the severity of those deficiencies. While this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, CMS flagged this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. This is not what you want to see. We advise you to direct your search elsewhere.

We gave this facility a grade of just D for our nursing rating and that actually turned out to be its second highest score. Our nursing score weighs a handful of subcategories, however, the most important consideration is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility provided only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is well below average. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in calculating our nursing ratings. This place performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.

This nursing home wound up receiving a a very poor score in our long-term care category. It was given an F in this area. For long-term care residents, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination statistics. We were pleased to discover that this nursing home vaccinated 99 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Surprisingly, this place also fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

The next area we looked at is short-term care. We gave it an abysmal F for this category, which is an abysmal grade. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to measure a facility's rehabilitation services. To provide quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to have higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. With a score in this range in this area, we weren't shocked to find this place was well below average in many staffing metrics we focus on. The nursing home supplied far fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The final datapoint we considered in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.1 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics doomed this nursing home's short-term care grade.