Nhc Healthcare, Anniston

With an overall grade this high, it should come as no surprise that this facility excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A. Our inspection grades are based on pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This nursing home was hit with 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered severe. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies to create an imminent threat to resident safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

On the list of its many elite scores, this facility was given first-rate short-term care score. In fact, we awarded it a score of A in this category. Our short-term care ratings are considered to be most meaningful for patients requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally requires more skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Turning our third category, this facility was given first-rate long-term care score. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- in this area. If you are looking for services other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care ratings. After considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 82.16216 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is slightly less than we anticipated but still a decent figure. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The last area we analyzed is nursing, where this nursing home was given a B+. This finished off an elite report card. Not many facilities earned a B+ or higher in each of our categories. Nursing scores are mostly based on the nursing home's nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving a patient more frequently.