The Oaks - Athens Skilled Nursing

The Oaks - Athens Skilled Nursing is a large nursing home located in Athens, Georgia. We gave this facility an overall grade of B. A grade of this caliber requires solid marks in most areas. You can certainly do much worse than this nursing home. This nursing home's impressive report card was highlighted by its inspection grade, which is addressed in the next section.

This nursing home received a quality overall score as described above, but we especially want to point out its excellent government inspections in recent years. We gave it an A in this category. Inspection scores are tied to several datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this area typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This tells you the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

This nursing home received an impressive short-term care score as well. We gave it one of our better scores in that area with a grade of B+. In determining these short-term care ratings, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our purpose is to formulate a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. One of this nursing home's strengths is physical therapy. We found that it offers at least one and a half times as many hours of physical therapy than most facilities. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who eventually returned home from this facility. On top of excelling in the area of physical therapy, we found that it fared as well as just about any nursing home in the nation with 63 percent of its residents returning home. Most nursing homes are below 50 percent in this statistic.

Turning to the next area, this nursing home also earned a grade of B+ for its long-term care rating. This is an above average grade in this area. When facilities receive a grade in this range in this category it generally means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. Once we assessed the volume of nursing care, we then looked at the facility's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 96.42857 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly is often a life or death ailment for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility does not leave its residents vulnerable. The last statistic we looked at was the facility's hospitalization rate. Here we found that this facility had 2.76 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. While this wasn't as strong as most of its other scores in this area, this number can be skewed for some facilities due to the medical complexity of residents.

This nursing home's least impressive area was nursing, which is the final category we assessed. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F in this area. In spite of some excellent grades in other areas, this score is still somewhat concerning so we felt obligated to point it out. Nursing ratings are largely associated with a facility's nurse staffing. Quantity of nursing care does not appear to be the problem here. Based on the data, it looks like this place provides an above average 3.9 hours per resident daily. This is more nursing care than most facilities offer. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed better than average in this area. This is often a good indicator of how carefully a facility's nursing staff is tending to its patients. Major falls can often be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.