With 53,253 people, Athens, Alabama is a small city. Unfortunately, there is only one nursing home in the city. Fortunately, its only nursing home received a strong overall grade of B+. For comparison's sake, we also looked at the facilities in the nearby city of Shelbyville. We found the facility in Athens to be in a totally different league than most of the facilities in Shelbyville. The best part of this nursing home's impressive report card is its inspection rating. We discuss inspections in the next section
In addition to receiving a strong overall grade, this city's nursing home performed extremely well in our inspection category. In fact, we awarded it an A+ for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This place also earned a grade of B+ for the area of long-term care. In our final two categories, this place received slightly below average grades for our short-term care and nursing categories.