Gulf Coast Health and Rehabilitation

Gulf Coast Health and Rehabilitation is an average-sized nursing home located in Mobile, Alabama. With an overall rating of A-, this facility is ranked among the better nursing homes we looked at. We couldn't find many negative things to say about this nursing home. Its ratings are just impeccable. More information on this facility's category grades may be found below. Its best category was long-term care, which is discussed in the next section.

We also found that this facility excelled in long-term care. We gave them an A+ in this category. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 99.6139 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia tragically can be a dangerous illness for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a facility doesn't take any chances. The last datapoint we assessed was the facility's hospitalization rate. We found that this facility had 3.6 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. While this admittedly wasn't as strong as most of its other scores in this area, this statistic can be skewed for some facilities based on some of the preexisting medical conditions of patients.

Turning to inspections, this facility excelled in that area, which is based on the facility's government inspections. We awarded it an A for that category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection grades. One of those factors is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some can be quite insignificant. While this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means 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.

This nursing home also was awarded a high-end short-term care grade. Indeed, this ended up being this facility's third strongest category grade. In that category, we gave this facility a grade of A-. In our short-term care grade, we endeavor to craft a valuable measure for rehabilitation services. In this process, we assess the nursing home's levels of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Fortunately, this nursing home offers both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities offer both. The final item we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it performed as well as just about any facility in Alabama in this area with 58.8 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, at most facilities, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

The next category we looked at is nursing. This nursing home was given a strong nursing grade in our assessment, with a grade of B-. Although this wasn't as impressive as many of its other grades, this is still a decent rating in that category. There are a host of subcategories within this area. Most of these data points are tied to the quantity of nurse staffing. According to CMS records, this nursing home averaged 4 hours of nursing care per patient daily. Keep in mind that when we compute our nursing grades, we add more weight to hours performed by nurses with a higher level of skill. Finally, we also factored a few quality-based metrics into our nursing grades. This facility was relatively weak in some of the major data points we focus on, with below average scores for minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. These areas are typically reliable measures of the quality of nursing care available.