Dade County Nursing Home District

We want to point out that this facility really outperformed its overall score in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our best grades in that area with a grade of A-. Inspection grades are tied to several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this area tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. A couple of minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This nursing home's second most favorable category turned out to be long-term care. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a B-. Long-term care grades are often used to judge a facility's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services provided by a skilled nursing facility. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Lastly, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This facilities next best area is short-term care. We awarded it a grade of C in this area. This is essentially a middle of the pack grade in this category. Short-term care grades are often employed to measure a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation To have high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to have higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Unfortunately, we found that this place provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The tricky part is determining what effect this had on the quality of care. Finally, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

The last category we looked at was nursing, which ended up being this nursing home's worst area. We gave this nursing home a grade of D in this category. Nursing ratings are based in large part on quality and quantity of nursing care. This place offered only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. To go along with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this nursing home also did not perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing ratings. We looked at the percent of residents experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This nursing home had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average facility.