Murfreesboro Tennessee State Veterans' Home

We also wanted to emphasize that this facility has earned excellent government inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A in this area. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Our nursing grade assesses the facility's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of licensure of those nurses and the number of hours spent with residents. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a system of turning a patient more frequently.

This facility also was awarded a dominant long-term care score. Indeed, this is this nursing home's third strongest category score. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. After assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 80.92308 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which happens to be somewhat less than we expected but still a respectable figure. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, we were pleased to find place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Switching gears to our final area, this nursing home also performed admirably in the short-term care category. In fact, we gave it a grade of B+ in that area. This rounded out a very strong profile. Short-term care grades are based in part on the nursing home's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a broad spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, in addition to other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final item we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.