Falkville Health & Rehab Center

We also found that this nursing home excelled in our long-term care rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this area. Facilities that do well in this category tend to provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. After we finished looking at the quantity of nursing care, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 99.66102 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is often a life or death condition for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave this to chance. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The next category we looked at was inspections, where this facility also received an A+ grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with higher grades in this category typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A. Our nursing grade analyzes the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of training of those nurses and the quantity of hours spent with patients. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics 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 state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving a resident more frequently.

Turning to the last area, this facility received a decent short-term care score. While this was not quite as dominant as some of its other grades, this is truly not a poor grade. Our short-term care ratings are believed to be most important for patients requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally requires additional highly-skilled nursing. This means not only nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients that ultimately returned home from this nursing home. We found that 4.7 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well below the national average.