The Oaks - Athens Skilled Nursing

This nursing home received a strong overall score as described above, but we especially wanted to emphasize its excellent health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A in this area. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with better scores in this category most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This means that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

This nursing home really excelled in the area of short-term care, where it received a score of A. Only a select group of facilities performed better in this area. Our short-term care scores are presumably more meaningful for folks in need of rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing. This includes not only nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final measure we considered in this category is the number of residents that were able to return home from the facility. We found that 6.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Turning to the category of nursing care, this facility didn't perform quite as well in this area as some of the categories discussed above. Nevertheless, a grade of B- in this category is by no means a bad score. There are a variety of datapoints within this grade. Many of these criteria are tied to the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This figure is far below the national average. Lastly, although this place got dinged a bit for nursing hours, it excelled in some of our quality-based metrics. With less than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it performed well in this statistic.

The next category we looked at was long-term care. This nursing home was given a very good long-term care score in our assessment, with a grade of C. Even though this wasn't quite as strong as several of its other scores, this remains a decent grade for this area. Our long-term care scores are more important for individuals needing more conventional services associated with activities of daily living. Once we finished looking at the amount of care provided by nurses, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 93.81443 percent of its patients against pneumonia. On a more positive note, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.