Diversicare of Pell City

While we weren't complementary of this nursing home's overall score, it earned an impressive long-term care score this year. We gave it a B+ in this area. 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 place is well-staffed with nurses and aids. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 99.51691 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly can be a life or death condition for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Surprisingly, this nursing home actually earned a good grade in inspections as well. In fact, we awarded it a B for that category, which is one of our better scores. Few facilities that were this poor overall received multiple category grades of this caliber. Inspection grades are tied to several pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are a key item to look for on these reports. You should especially avoid facilities that have severe deficiencies linked to endangerment of patients. This place received 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

This nursing home actually received a decent grade in the area of nursing as well. We awarded it a grade of C for that category, which is not a bad score. Our nursing score analyzes a handful of factors, however, the main one is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This particular nursing home provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This figure is significantly below the national average. Lastly, despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this place performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is typically an indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place.

The last category we analyzed was short-term care, in which this facility received a bottom of the barrel grade in this category as well. It received an F in this category, which is definitely somewhat alarming. Short-term care scores are critical for people needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires additional highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a broad range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. With a grade this poor for this area, we were not surprised to learn that this facility was well below average in many staffing figures we assess. In fact, it supplied substantially fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The last datapoint we considered in this area is the percentage of residents that ultimately returned home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 4.4 percent of its residents returning home. Unfortunately, this was well below average.