West Meade Place

West Meade Place is located in the large metropolitan area of Nashville, Tennessee. Sporting an overall score of C, this is likely a middle of the road nursing home. This grade is not too far off the city grade for Nashville, which is a B-. The best part of this facility's profile is its remarkable inspection reports. Inspection reports are discussed in the next section.

The main reason this facility received a decent overall score is its excellent inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our better scores in that category, with an A. This is a notably better score than the place's overall score, which was decent but not in the elite range. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some end up being quite insignificant. This nursing home was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe. This indicates that the government inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to be an imminent risk to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

Another one of this nursing home's higher category grades came in the area of short-term care. In that area, we gave this nursing home a grade of B. It actually fared better than most facilities in this category. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to grade a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To offer good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. One reason for this facility's strong score in this category is that it provides a greater volume of physical therapist hours to its residents than the average nursing home. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients that ultimately returned home from this facility. On top of excelling in the area of physical therapy staffing, we found that it fared as well as just about any nursing home in the country with 60 percent of its patients returning home. Most facilities are below 50 percent in this statistic.

This nursing home's third best category was long-term care. We awarded it a C in this area. This is basically a slightly below average score in this area. In calculating these long-term care ratings, we look at the facility's ability to maintain its permanent residents' health and quality of life. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. We were optimistic to discover that this nursing home vaccinated 94.44444 percent of its patients for pneumonia. This place was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Although it had 1.77 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, its risk adjusted statistic was better than most nursing homes due to it having some more complicated patients.

The next category we rated was nursing, was this facility's least impressive area. We awarded this facility a grade of D in that category. Our nursing grade is largely associated with a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We do not think quantity of care was the reason for this facility's poor nursing rating. With 5.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily, this facility actually surpassed the national average. Despite performing well in terms of nursing hours, this place was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing ratings. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and found that this facility was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, this statistic pulled down this nursing home's nursing grade substantially.