Diversicare of Bessemer

With an address in Bessemer, Alabama, Diversicare of Bessemer is one of five facilities in this city. Featuring an overall grade of B+, this nursing home should work for most prospective residents. We were pleased to find out that this was in line with the other facilities in Bessemer, which is one of the better cities in Alabama to find a nursing home. This nursing home was better in some categories than others, but it did not have any poor grades in any of our major categories. More information about these categories can be found below.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this nursing home earned near flawless government inspections in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors didn't 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.

This nursing home performed well in the category of long-term care. Indeed, we gave it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our most dominant scores. In a long-term care setting, the primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 84.586464 percent of its residents. This is slightly less than we were hoping for but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. Lastly, we looked at the facility's number of hospitalizations. Here we found that this nursing home had 3.26 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Although this admittedly wasn't as impressive as most of its other scores in this area, this figure can be skewed for some nursing homes based on the medical complexity of residents.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. While this wasn't quite as good as some of its other category grades, this isn't a bad score either. Our nursing rating is mostly associated with a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages just 3.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day, which is well below average. Finally, we also baked a few quality measures into our nursing scores. This facility was subpar in two of the major metrics we look at, with below average scores for minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. These areas are typically indicators of the quality of nursing care provided.

The next area we looked at is short-term care. In that area, we awarded this facility a decent grade of B-. This actually was this facility's least impressive area. In calculating these short-term care ratings, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The objective is to formulate a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. It performed decently in this area, with 48.8 percent of its residents returning home.