Aspire Physical Recovery Center at Cahaba River

In addition to being a top notch facility overall, it also excelled in inspections, where it received an A. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. These inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

Contributing to its first-rate profile, this nursing home also performed well in our short-term care area. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category. In computing our short-term care scores, we size up a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This score is typically a meaningful assessment of the facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home 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. The final metric we considered in this category is the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that 5.2 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Turning to our third area, this facility also earned a score of B+ for its long-term care rating. This is an above average score in this category. Facilities that excel in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Turning to our last area, this facility was awarded an excellent nursing grade. Although this wasn't as strong as a few of its other grades, this is nevertheless one of the more favorable scores we offer. We looked at the skill-level of nurses at the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of time those nurses were with patients, in determining our grade in this category. This nursing home averages 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed better than average in this area. This is often a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.