Driftwood Nursing Center

Driftwood Nursing Center is a large government-owned facility located in Gulfport, Mississippi. We awarded this nursing home an overall grade of B. A grade of this caliber requires quality marks in most areas. Based on all of the relevant data, you can do much worse than this place. You also may want to review this nursing home's category grades below. We discuss long-term care in the next paragraph.

One of the reasons this turned out to be a strong facility is that it earned a very impressive long-term care rating. In fact, long-term care ended up being its best category. In that area, we gave this facility an impressive grade of A+. Facilities that receive this kind of grade in long-term care tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure residents are kept in good health. After we finished looking at the quantity of nursing care, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is often a life threatening ailment for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. The last datapoint we assessed is the facility's hospitalization rate. We found that this facility had 2.76 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. While this admittedly wasn't as impressive as most of its other scores in this area, this number may be skewed for some facilities based on some of the medical complexity of patients.

This facility also performed well in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. It received one of our best grades in that area with an A+. Few facilities with an overall grade in this range performed as well in multiple categories. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This nursing home received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This tells you that the inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to be an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. While this wasn't quite as good as some of its other category grades, this isn't a bad score either. The nursing rating assesses a handful of subcategories, but the main consideration is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 3.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in some quality-focused statistics. Specifically, we look at the percent of residents who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these datapoints as reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

Switching gears to the fourth area, we gave this nursing home a grade of D in our short-term care category. This is the nursing home's worst category grade. Of course, this score pulled down the facility's overall grade to some degree. In calculating our short-term care scores, we analyze a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This score is often a meaningful assessment of a facility's rehabilitation. In this nursing home's case, we found that it provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The final metric we considered in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 39.1 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics sunk this nursing home's short-term care score.