Blue Ridge Healthcare Birmingham

On top of receiving a great overall score, this place also received first-rate health inspections in recent years. We gave it one of our best scores in that area, with an A. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this category most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home fared well in our long-term care category. In fact, we awarded it a score of A- for that category, which is one of our best grades. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 7.627119 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of C in this category. While this wasn't quite as good as some of its other category grades, this isn't a bad score either. The nursing grade weighs a handful of components, but the paramount consideration is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This place provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a lower figure than we were hoping for. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place actually excelled in some of the quality measures we assessed. In fact, it performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the quantity of hours of care offered.

This nursing home's worst area is short-term care, which is the final category we scored. In this area, we gave this facility a grade of D. In computing these short-term care grades, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to create a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. The last item we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 0 percent of its patients returning home. This was well below average.