The Waters of Cheatham

With an address in Ashland City, Tennessee, The Waters of Cheatham is one of just a few facilities in this city. Featuring an overall grade of B-, this is likely a middle of the pack nursing home. In our view, this place is a solid choice for quite a few people. The best part of this facility's profile is its exemplary inspection grade. Inspection grades are discussed in the next paragraph.

We want to point out that this nursing home really outperformed its overall score in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in this category with an A. These inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also performed well in the area of long-term care. Indeed, we awarded it a grade of A- in that category, which happens to be one of our best grades. For prospective patients looking for a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 70.722435 percent of its residents. This is slightly less than we were hoping for but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. The last statistic we looked at is its hospitalization rate. Here we found that this nursing home had 3.34 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Although this admittedly wasn't as strong as most of its other scores in this area, this number may be skewed for some facilities due to some of the medical complexity of residents.

Moving on to another strength for this facility, it also earned an elite nursing score. In fact, we gave this nursing home an D. Nursing scores are based largely on levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home averaged just 3.1 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is well below average. Lastly, we also looked at a few quality measures in computing our nursing grades. This nursing home was above average in two of the datapoints we focus on, with good marks for minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.

Turning to the last area, this facility really did not perform very well. Due to a poor grade of F in short-term care, this was this nursing home's poorest area. Our short-term care scores are vital for people needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires more skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a wide spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. We found that this place was subpar in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its residents based on the metrics we looked at. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who eventually returned home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 37.2 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.