Crystal River Health and Rehabilitation Center

On top of performing well in its overall score, this facility earned even higher grades in the area of long-term care. It earned one of our highest scores in that area with a grade of A. Facilities that excel in this category tend to provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. One of the criteria we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccines. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. This is a great way to avoid unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the senior population. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home also performed well in the area of inspections. It earned a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our best grades in that category with an A. Few nursing homes with an overall score in this range performed as well in multiple categories. Our inspection grades are based on items located in the a nursing home's government inspections. Nursing homes that score well in this area have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the inspectors didn't deem 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.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B. Our nursing grade is based on several factors. The most heavily weighted one is the amount of time nurses spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The last area we looked at is short-term care, where this nursing home was given a grade of B-. Although this wound up being its lowest category rating, this is still not a terrible score. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to grade a facility's rehabilitation services. To have highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last measure we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients that ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 4.2 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.