East Alabama Medical Center Skilled Nursing Facili

In addition to faring well overall, this facility also received nearly flawless government inspections. As a result, it received one of our best scores in that area with an A+. Inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those 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 safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to direct your attention to the fact that this facility performed well in our short-term care rating. We gave them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. In computing these short-term care ratings, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The goal is to formulate a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return home from this facility. We found that 7.3 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

Turning our third area, we awarded this facility a score of A for our long-term care rating. This is a dominant rating. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. One of the criteria we considered after nurse's aid hours is vaccines. It does not appear that this facility provided vaccination data. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In our final area, we gave this nursing home an A+ for our nursing grade. This rounded out a first-rate report card. Our nursing category analyzes quite a few subcategories, most of which are based on nursing hours. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these metrics as good measures of the caliber of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.