Coosa Valley Healthcare Center

In addition to being an elite facility overall, this facility performed well in our inspections category, where it received an A+. Few places performed this well in this category. Our inspection ratings are tied to several datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you CMS didn't deem 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.

This nursing home also received an A+ nursing grade, making it one of the few nursing homes to receive multiple A+ category grades. Nursing scores are largely based on a facility's level of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

We also would like to alert you to the fact that this facility was awarded a first-rate grade of A in our long-term care area. For long-term care residents, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. After assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. Unfortunately, we weren't able to track down information about this nursing home's vaccination rates. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In the final category we assessed, this facility was awarded an impressive grade grade of A- in our short-term care category. With this score, the nursing home wrapped up a straight A profile. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to grade a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to have highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.