Albemarle Health and Rehabilitation Center

With an address in Charlottesville, Virginia, Albemarle Health and Rehabilitation Center is one of eight available nursing homes in the city. We awarded it an overall grade of B-, which is a middle of the road score. The nursing homes in Charlottesville received quality scores across the board with a city grade of a B. One of the better aspects of this facility's report card is its strong inspection rating, which is addressed in the next section.

While this facility's overall grade was not bad, it really fared well in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our best scores. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

This nursing home also performed well in the area of short-term care. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- in that category, which is one of our highest grades. With our short-term care grade, we try to craft a valuable measure for rehabilitation. In this process, we assess the nursing home's levels of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Remarkably, this facility provides its residents with at least 50% more physical therapist hours per week than the average facility. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of facilities with 63.2 percent of its residents returning home. This is a significantly higher rate than most facilities.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B-. There are a variety of factors within this category. Many of the datapoints reflect staffing levels. This nursing home provides 3.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also considered some quality-based metrics. This place scored well in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. By way of illustration, in terms of the percentage of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, this nursing home beat the national average. This is usually a reliable indicator that a nursing home has sufficient quality controls in place. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented with better nursing care.

Switching gears to our final area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of D in long-term care. This is the nursing home's least impressive category rating. Sadly, this score hurt the nursing home's overall grade a bit. Long-term care ratings in this range generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids. One of the statistics we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours is vaccines. We were a bit concerned this facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to a relatively low 83.95522 percent of its patients. Unfortunately, its hospitalization rate was also a cause for concern. Here we found that this facility had 2.13 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an alarming rate.