Diversicare of Montgomery

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A. Few facilities performed better in this area. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be quite insignificant. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means 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. A couple minor deficiencies aren't something to panic about.

Adding to this facility's list of strengths, it also received an excellent nursing score. We gave them an impressive grade of B- in this category. Nursing ratings are mostly tied to the facility's nurse staffing. This place provided just 2.9 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a low total compared to most facilities. Lastly, our nursing scores also factor in quality-based measures, such as avoiding major falls. While this place did not have as many nursing hours as many of the other facilities we looked at, it was still better than average in the area of preventing major falls.

This facility's third best category turned out to be its long-term care score, where it was awarded a grade of B-. Long-term care scores are based on a nursing home's amount of nursing care. This includes a vast spectrum of personal care services, ranging from help with activities of daily living to routine healthcare services. One of the datapoints we considered on top of nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. Thankfully, this nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its residents. Lastly, this nursing home was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Moving on to our final category, we gave this nursing home a grade of D in the area of short-term care. This was the facility's least impressive category rating. Sadly, this grade hurt the facility's overall profile to a certain degree. With our short-term care grade, we attempt to create a fair gauge for rehabilitation. In doing so, we look at a facility's level of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. We found that this place was below average in several staffing areas we looked at. It offered fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most facilities. The final datapoint we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 37 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics sunk this nursing home's short-term care grade.