Azalea Health and Rehabilitation Center

Azalea Health and Rehabilitation Center is an average-sized nursing home located in Augusta, Georgia. Featuring an overall score of B-, this appears to be a decent facility. The facilities in Augusta received quality scores across the board with a city grade of a B. The best part of this nursing home's report card was its exemplary inspection rating. Inspection reports are discussed in the next paragraph.

We want to point out that this facility outperformed its overall grade in the category of inspections. In fact, it received an excellent inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest scores in that area with an A. Arguably the most significant factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this category most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This nursing home was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Another strength of this nursing home is its very impressive score in long-term care. We awarded them one of our more favorable grades in that area, with a score of A. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in this category it generally means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 97.56944 percent of its patients, which is far higher than most nursing homes. Lastly, we looked at the nursing home's number of hospitalizations. Here we found that this place had 3.24 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. While this wasn't as strong as most of its other scores in this area, this number may be skewed for some facilities based on some of the preexisting medical conditions of residents.

This nursing home's nursing grade appears to be one of its better features. The facility received a grade of C in this category. There are quite a few subcategories within this category. Many of the subcategories relate to levels of nurse staffing. According to its CMS reports, this nursing home provided an average of 3.9 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis, which was above average. Even though this facility excelled in terms of quantity of nursing hours, it lagged a bit in some of the datapoints that related to quality. This facility's nursing score was hurt by its subpar performance in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers. We found that 19.5 percent of this nursing home's patients sustained pressure ulcers.

Moving on to our next area, we gave this facility a D for short-term care. This was the nursing home's worst category grade. Naturally, this grade pulled down the nursing home's overall profile a bit. Short-term care grades are generally used to score a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Unfortunately, we found that this place provided less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most nursing homes. Finally, we assessed the number of residents that were able to return home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 33.7 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.