Crowne Health Care of Ft Payne

On top of being a great nursing home overall, it also earned A+ inspections recently. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Our inspection scores weigh a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better grades in this area tend to have very few severe deficiencies. While this place had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A- in our nursing category. The nursing grade considers numerous factors. The most heavily weighted factor is the amount of time nurses spent with patients. This nursing home averages 0.4 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 place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Contributing to its strong assessment, this nursing home also received an excellent long-term care grade, with a grade of A-. When nursing homes receive this type of score in long-term care it is usually a good sign for patient care and indicates that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 99.4382 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents healthy. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The next category we graded was short-term care, in which this facility was given a grade of B-. Although this ended up being its lowest category score, this is still a middle of the pack score. In the category of short-term care, we endeavor to evaluate indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final datapoint we looked at in this area is the number of residents that were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 4.6 percent of this facility's residents returned home.