Bradenton Health Care

This facility earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its nearly flawless health inspection reports in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A- in this category. Our inspection scores are based on several datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this category have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This means the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

Another one of this nursing home's better category grades was in the area of short-term care. In that area, we gave this facility a B. Short-term care grades are typically employed to grade a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To have highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to feature higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final metric we looked at in this category is the number of patients who returned home from the facility. We found that 4.9 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

This nursing home also received a strong nursing grade. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B in that category, which is one of our better scores. Our nursing rating is based on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We consider both the levels of training of those nurses and the amount of time spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next category we scored was long-term care. It received a lowly F in this area, which is an abysmal score. This is clearly a major concern. If you are seeking services other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care ratings. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 97.6 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this place also keeps its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.