Citrus Health and Rehabilitation Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. These inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

In addition, this facility also received favorable short-term care scores this year. Indeed, we awarded it one of our more favorable scores in that category, with a score of B+. In computing our short-term care ratings, we look at the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This score is considered to be a reliable measure of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. We were not able to find registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this facility. Finally, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.8 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

This facility is also strong in the category of long-term care, where it was given a grade of B. It outpaced most nursing homes in this area. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. One of the datapoints we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccines. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a proven method to avoid unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the elderly population. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Switching gears to the next category, this facility received an acceptable nursing score of B-. Nursing ratings are heavily correlated with quality and quantity of nursing care. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures. While this place got dinged a bit for its nursing hours, it excelled in a few of these quality-based metrics. With fewer than five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it did well in this subcategory. This is typically an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by having a system of moving patients even once per day.