Douglasville Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

While this place's overall score was terrible, it actually fared well in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a B+ for that category, which is one of our better scores. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. It is typically best to avoid facilities that have a long list of deficiencies. While this place had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

We gave this facility just a D for our long-term care score and that actually wound up as its second best score. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Frankly, we were a bit concerned this facility gave the vaccine to just 87.5 percent of its residents. Surprisingly, this nursing home actually fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.

Unfortunately, this facility only received a D for its short-term care rating, which is not a score to write home about. Short-term care scores are important for residents requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a vast range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. With a grade in this range for this area, we weren't surprised to find this nursing home was below average in many staffing areas we looked at. It offered far fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most nursing homes. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.9 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.

Switching gears to the last category, this facility really didn't fare well in this area either. With a bottom of the barrel grade of F in nursing, this is about as bad as it gets. Our nursing grade analyzes the facility's level of nurse staffing. We consider both the levels of skill of those nurses and the quantity of hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Unfortunately, this facility also had abysmal marks in some of the quality-based metrics to pair with its low nursing hour totals. We looked at the percentage of patients sustaining pressure ulcers and we were quite disappointed. This place was at approximately 1.5 times the national average in this metric. This is a bad sign in light of the fact that many pressure ulcers are preventable with better nursing care. This statistic helped pull down this nursing home's nursing grade significantly.