Coosa Valley Health and Rehab

One of the reasons this ended up being a strong nursing home is that it earned an impressive inspection grade. In fact, inspections turned out to be its best category. In that category, we gave it an A-. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This means that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report 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.

Additionally, this nursing home also received favorable long-term care grades in our assessment. Indeed, we gave it one of our better scores in that category, with a grade of B+. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in long-term care it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 99.58678 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is much higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility received a very good nursing grade this year as well. It received one of our better scores in that category with a grade of B. Nursing ratings are based largely on quantity of nursing care available. This facility provided 0.3 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 well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The next category we looked at was short-term care. In that category, we gave this facility a B-. In crafting these short-term care scores, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our goal is to create a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last metric we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.