Oak Trace Care & Rehabilitation Center

Oak Trace Care & Rehabilitation Center is located in Bessemer, Alabama. With an overall score of C, this looks like a decent nursing home. Based on our assessment, there are certainly much worse facilities out there. The best part of this place's profile was its exemplary inspection rating. Inspection grades are discussed in the next section.

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this place also excelled in the category of inspections, where it received an A+. Few facilities performed better in this area. Inspection scores are tied to datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this area tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this place had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

Turning to an additional strength for this facility, it also received a first-rate long-term care score. In fact, we awarded this facility a score of A-. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 90.625 percent of its patients, which is a bit below what we expected. Lastly, we looked at its number of hospitalizations. Here we found that this nursing home had 2.3 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days.

This facility also received a strong nursing rating. In fact, we gave it a F in this area. Nursing ratings are tied to quality and quantity of nursing care. This nursing home averaged a meager 2.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing ratings. This facility was above average in two of the statistics we considered, with solid marks for minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. These areas are usually good indicators of the quality of nursing care offered.

The last category we analyzed is short-term care. Unfortunately, we gave it an F in this category, which is an abysmal grade. This is obviously a significant concern. In crafting our short-term care grades, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to formulate a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. With a score of this caliber in this category, we weren't shocked to find this facility was well below average in two of the key staffing areas we focus on. The facility offered far fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The final metric we considered in this category is the percentage of residents that were able to return home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 37.2 percent of its residents returning home.