Blue Ridge Healthcare Selma

With an address in Selma, Alabama, Blue Ridge Healthcare Selma is one of just a few nursing homes in this city. This is a fine nursing home. We gave it an overall grade of B, which is a very solid score. Based on our assessment, this nursing home looks like a solid choice for most people. The best part of this facility's strong profile is its inspection score. Inspection reports are discussed in the next section

This facility received a strong overall score as described above, but we especially wanted to emphasize its excellent government inspections in recent years. We gave them an A+ in this area. Inspection ratings are tied to items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this category tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home performed well in our long-term care category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our best grades. When facilities receive this type of grade in this category it is usually a good sign for resident care and indicates that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses aids. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 99.77064 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents out of the hospital. This facility also keeps its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 1.42 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days.

Turning to the category of nursing care, this facility didn't perform quite as well in this area as some of the categories discussed above. Nevertheless, a grade of B- in this category is by no means a bad score. Nursing ratings are based in large part on quality and quantity of nursing care. This facility averages 2.9 hours of nursing care per resident each day, which is a very low figure. Lastly, nursing scores also factor in quality-based metrics, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this place actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is often an indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place. Many falls can be avoided if a nursing home supplies enough nurses to assist its residents.

The next area we analyzed is short-term care, turned out to be this facility's least impressive category. We awarded this facility a grade of D in that category. This was one of the couple of weak links of a quality profile. In forming these short-term care grades, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The objective is to create a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different 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 datapoint we considered in this area is the percentage of patients that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 42.6 percent of its patients returning home. This was well below average.