Diversicare of Tylertown

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. 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.

To complement its strong accomplishments in other areas, we gave this nursing home a grade of A for its long-term care grade. When facilities receive a grade in this range in long-term care it generally means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients, which is much higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B+. Nursing scores are based in large part on nurse staffing levels. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a policy of turning patients more often.

The last category we rated is short-term care, in which this facility received a B-. This ended up being this facility's weakest area. This is still not a poor grade. Our short-term care grade is typically used to assess a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to have high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.1 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.