Cypress Garden Center for Nursing and Rehab

The primary reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it received an elite inspection grade. In fact, its inspection grade was far superior to its overall grade. In the inspections category, we gave it an A+. These inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Based on this, we still had positive view of this nursing home's recent inspections.

This facilities second most favorable category is long-term care. We gave it a B- in this category. This is basically a slightly below average grade in this area. Our long-term care grade is typically used to measure a facility's performance as a traditional convalescent home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services provided by a rehabilitation facility. One of the statistics we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours was vaccinations. Thankfully, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 99.45887 percent of its patients. This facility was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This nursing home ended up receiving a rock-bottom grade in our short-term care area. It was given a lowly F in this category. Short-term care scores are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This includes a wide scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other types of therapy. Given its grade in this category, we were not surprised to find that this place is well below average in terms of the number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its patients based on the measures we assessed. Honestly, this was about what we expected here. The last metric we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 3.5 percent of its residents returning home.

The next category we rated is nursing. Sadly, it received an F in this category, which is a very poor grade. This is obviously a major concern. Our nursing grade is based on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of training of the nurses and the amount of time spent with residents. This particular place averaged just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This number is quite a bit below average. On top of receiving below average scores for total nursing hours, this nursing home was less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of residents suffering pressure ulcers and found this nursing home was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in this statistic.