Diversicare of Ripley

In addition to receiving a strong overall grade, this nursing home performed even better in the area of inspections which is based on the facility's recent government inspection reports. In fact, we awarded it an A for that category, which is one of our highest grades. Arguably the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this category most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility performed well in our long-term care category. Indeed, we awarded it a grade of A- for that area, which is one of our better scores. When nursing homes receive this type of score in this category it is a good sign for patient care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 99.4832 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients healthy. 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 number.

This facility is also above average in the area of short-term care, where it received a grade of B+. It performed better than most facilities in this category. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to gauge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation In order to offer highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.8 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The next area we assessed was nursing. This facility was awarded a strong nursing grade this year, with a grade of C. Although this is not as elite as a few of its other scores, this remains an acceptable grade in this category. When determining our nursing grades, we analyze both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of those nurses. This place provides only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a somewhat concerning figure which is well below average. Lastly, we also baked some quality measures into our nursing grades. This facility was relatively weak in two of the major metrics we look at, with below average scores for minimizing its patients' major falls and pressure ulcers. These areas are typically reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care offered.