Diversicare of Foley

Diversicare of Foley is the sole option we identified in Foley, Alabama. We awarded it an overall grade of C, which is a middle of the pack rating. In our view, this facility looks like a solid choice for most people. One of the highlights of this facility's profile is its strong nursing grade, which you can find in the next section.

The main thing propping up this nursing home's profile is its elite nursing score. We gave this nursing home an A- in that category. The nursing grade is based on several subcategories. The most heavily weighted variable is the amount of time nurses spent with residents. This nursing home provides 3.1 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at a few quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place excelled in these areas, with excellent scores for minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. These areas are generally reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care a facility provides.

We also want to note that this facility was awarded a great short-term care grade. In fact, it received one of our most favorable scores in that category with a grade of A-. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to measure a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to offer high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide better levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, this nursing home offers both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities offer both. The last metric we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that it was above average in this area with 55.8 percent of its residents returning home.

We also awarded this facility a middle of the pack grade in the category of long-term care, where we gave it a B-. Our long-term care grade is generally used to measure a nursing home's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services offered by a skilled nursing facility. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Thankfully, this nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is a very solid statistic. This facility was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 1.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a substantially lower hospitalization rate than the majority of nursing homes.

The last category we assessed was inspections. This facility did not receive favorable government inspections in recent years. In fact, we gave it an F in this category. This dragged down this nursing home's overall score quite a bit. When a facility has this poor of an inspection score, you should look for severe deficiencies on its inspection report. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to the well being of residents. This particular nursing home was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they posed a threat to resident health or safety. Lastly, we also would like to point out that this nursing home received significant government fines totaling over $100,000. This often suggests that a bad track record spanned more than one year.