Barfield Health Care

With an address in Guntersville, Alabama, Barfield Health Care is one of just a couple available nursing homes in the city. We awarded this facility an overall grade of B+. A grade in this range requires above average scores in most areas. Based on our assessment, this facility looks like a good fit for most people. Fortunately, this place didn't have any bad scores in any of the major categories. Additional information about these categories can be found below.

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection scores. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these end up being relatively minor. This place was assessed 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the government inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies an immediate risk to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among this facility's other strengths is its high-end long-term care score. It received one of our more impressive grades in that area, with a grade of A-. Facilities that do well in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to considering the elite quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff at this facility, we also were happy with the nursing home's record for vaccinations. By way of example, this facility gave the pneumonia vaccine to 97.05882 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. This combination proved to be successful as this facility keeps its patients out of the hospital. It had just 1.35 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-. This facility didn't perform quite as well in this category as it did in some other categories. Nevertheless, this is still a respectable score. The nursing score consists of many datapoints, however, the main consideration is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. With 4.7 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, this place surpassed the majority of nursing homes. Lastly, we also factored some quality measures into our nursing grades. Specifically, we looked at the percent of residents who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these statistics as reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

The last category we looked at was short-term care. We gave this facility an acceptable grade in this category, with a grade of C. While this isn't as favorable as some of this nursing home's other grades, it is nevertheless a middle of the pack score. In calculating our short-term care grades, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to formulate a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. This nursing home employs both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities employ these skilled professionals. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. We found that 12.7 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was actually below the national average.