Beach Terrace Care Center

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this place also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a grade of A+. Few facilities performed better in this area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some can be relatively insignificant. While this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple relatively minor dings aren't necessarily the end of the world.

Another strength of this nursing home is its impressive score in long-term care. We awarded them one of our most impressive scores in that area, with a score of A-. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in this category it generally means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 99.837135 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly can be a deadly ailment for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility does not take any chances. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home's next highest category ended up being short-term care. In that area, we gave this facility a C. Our short-term care grades are presumably more meaningful for patients needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically requires additional highly-skilled nursing. This means not merely nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last datapoint we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that just 4.6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

The next category we graded was nursing, which proved to be this facility's weakest category. Sadly, it received a lowly F in this area, which is obviously very disappointing. Nursing grades are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home averaged only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. On top of receiving below average marks for nursing hours, this place was less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing scores. We looked at the percentage of patients suffering pressure ulcers and found this nursing home was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in this metric. This is a bad sign when you consider that so many bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, this statistic really pulled down this nursing home's nursing rating substantially.