Ahava Healthcare of Alabaster

The main reason this nursing home received a decent overall grade is its impeccable health inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our higher grades in that category, with an A. This is a notably better grade than the facility's overall score, which was decent but certainly not elite. Our inspection grades account for several factors included in a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better scores in this area tend to have few of these severe deficiencies. This nursing home received 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that CMS didn't deem any of these deficiencies to pose an immediate threat to resident safety or health. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

We also want to note that this nursing home received a great long-term care score. Indeed, we awarded it one of our best grades in that category with a score of A-. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. After considering the quantity of nursing care, we then looked at the facility's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 99.41521 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly is often a life or death health condition for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home does not leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. In calculating our nursing scores, we weigh both staffing levels and the training levels of those nurses. This place provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is a lower figure than we were hoping for. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures. Although this place got dinged a bit for nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in some of these quality-based metrics. With fewer than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it fared remarkably well in this statistic. This is often a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a policy of moving patients more often.

The last category we scored is short-term care, which proved to be this nursing home's weakest area. We awarded this nursing home a D in this area. Sadly, this category hurt the nursing home's overall profile to some degree. In calculating our short-term care grades, we analyze the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other types of therapists. This grade is considered to be a meaningful assessment of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. In this nursing home's case, we found that it provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.2 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.