Alliance Health at Devereux

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection ratings. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these end up being quite insignificant. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that category, we awarded this facility an B+. Our nursing grade is primarily based on a facility's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a policy of turning patients more frequently.

Additionally, this facility also was awarded favorable short-term care grades in our assessment. In fact, we awarded them one of our better grades in that category, with a score of B+. Short-term care grades are based in part on the nursing home's quantity of skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a vast spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, in addition to other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last metric we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients who eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that 5.4 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

The final category we rated was long-term care, proved to be this facility's weakest category. We gave this nursing home a grade of D in this category. This is one of the few weak links in a quality profile. Nursing homes that do not score well in long-term care often don't provide as much nursing care and also may be struggling in some of the areas of routine personal care we looked at. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 66.25767 percent of its residents. This is significantly lower than average. To our surprise, this facility was actually decent at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best score in this category.