Delmar Gardens of Smyrna

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is it received an A+ inspection grade. This is as good as it gets in this category. These inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that the government inspectors 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 facility truly excelled in the area of short-term care, where we gave it a grade of A-. Very few nursing homes performed more favorably in this area. With our short-term care assessment, we endeavor to create a fair measure for rehabilitation. In this process, we assess a nursing home's levels of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last datapoint we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 6.3 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

The third category we assessed is long-term care. It received one of our best grades in that area, with a A-. Nursing homes that do well in this category tend to provide residents with better supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 98.46154 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia can be a life or death ailment for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a facility does not leave this to chance. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Switching gears to the fourth category, this nursing home received a respectable nursing score. Although this is not quite as impressive as a few of its other scores, this is still not a terrible score. Our nursing score focuses on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of skill of those nurses and the amount of time spent with residents. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Finally, nursing scores also factor in quality-based assessments, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this place actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is typically a reliable indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place. Some falls can be avoided if a nursing home provides enough nurses to assist its patients.