The Villages at Oak Ridge

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some are relatively minor. This facility received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that CMS didn't consider any of these deficiencies to cause an immediate threat to patient health or safety. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

On the list of its many impressive scores, this nursing home was awarded a strong short-term care grade. In fact, it received a score of A- in this area. In our short-term care assessment, we endeavor to create a valuable gauge for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we analyze the facility's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

In addition, this facility also received favorable nursing grades this year. In fact, we awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. We scrutinized the licensure of nurses at the facility, as well as the quantity of hours the nurses spent with patients, in determining our score in this area. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this facility 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 state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a policy of moving a resident even once per day.

Turning to our next area, this facility was awarded a strong long-term care grade. Even though this wasn't as dominant as several of its other category grades, this remains one of our better grades a facility can receive. For prospective residents seeking a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 80.35714 percent of its patients, which is somewhat below what we were hoping for. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we had hoped, at least this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.