Fairhope Health and Rehab

To pair with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. When facilities receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is too frequently a life or death ailment for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home does not leave this to chance. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This nursing home also received a nearly flawless inspection report. As a result, it earned one of our highest scores in that area with an A+. This is one of the few places to receive multiple A+ category grades. Inspection ratings are based on datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this area have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- in that category. Our nursing grade is based on several factors, but the primary one is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

In our last area, this nursing home also was given an excellent short-term care rating, with a B+. This finished off an elite profile. Our short-term care scores are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a broad scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. We were not able to find information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The final statistic we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who eventually returned home from the facility. We found that 5.6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.