Oakwood-North Baldwin's Center for Living

Oakwood-North Baldwin's Center for Living is a small non-profit facility located in Bay Minette, Alabama. With an overall score of A-, this facility is one of the better facilities we looked at. In fact, we ranked this nursing home in the top third of all nursing homes in the United States. This facility's strong profile was highlighted by its inspection score, which we will address in the next paragraph.

In addition to being a first rate facility overall, this facility also performed well in the area of inspections, where it earned an A+. Few facilities performed as well in this category. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you the inspectors didn't consider 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.

We also would like to point out the fact that this facility received a first-rate score of A- in our short-term care area. Our short-term care grades are based on the facility's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a wide spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, in addition to other variations of therapy. It does not look like this nursing home submitted information on registered nurse or physical therapist staffing. The final measure we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents that were able to return home from the nursing home. This place fared better than most nursing homes in this area with 54.9 percent of its residents returning home. With most facilities, fewer than half of their short-term patients are able to return home.

This nursing home is also above average in the area of long-term care, where it was given a score of B+. It outperformed most facilities in this category. Nursing homes that receive this kind of grade in this category typically provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure patients are well cared for. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 99.57627 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is far higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.84 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The last category we assessed was nursing. This facility was given an above average nursing grade this year, with a grade of B-. Although this isn't as dominant as a few of its other grades, this is nevertheless an acceptable rating for this category. In computing our nursing scores, we analyze both nursing hours and the levels of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we like to look at quality-based metrics, such as the percentage of residents who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. These data points are decent indicators of the quality of nursing care.