Alice Byrd Tawes Nursing Home

One of the reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received a very impressive nursing score. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of A. In calculating our nursing scores, we assess both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the skill levels of those nurses. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a system of moving residents even once per day.

This facility also excelled in the area of inspections. We gave it an A- for that area. Inspection grades are tied to many datapoints located in the a nursing home's government inspections. Places that excel in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this place had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. A few relatively minor deficiencies are not necessarily something to panic about.

The third area we graded is short-term care. This facility received an above average short-term care grade, with a grade of B+ in the area. With our short-term care score, we endeavor to craft a meaningful gauge for rehabilitation. In this process, we look at a nursing home's offerings of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return home from this facility. We found that 4.1 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

The last area we graded is long-term care, where this facility received a B-. While this is its weakest category grade, this is still not the end of the world. Our long-term care grades are more important for those in need of more conventional assistance related to personal care. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 92.703865 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which happens to be slightly lower than we anticipated but still a decent percentage. Nevertheless, this place excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.