Fort Pierce Health Care

To go along with its decent overall score, we gave this nursing home an A- for our nursing rating. This score is far more impressive than the facility's overall grade. When determining our nursing ratings, we weigh both nursing hours and the training levels of the nurses. 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 frequently be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This facility actually earned a solid government inspection report this year as well, with few major dings from the applicable government inspectors. As a result, it received one of our better scores in that category with a B-. We were surprised this facility received multiple category grades of this caliber. These inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This place was hit with 8 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This means that the inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies to create an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

The third most favorable category we gave this facility in any category came in the area of short-term care, where we awarded it a grade of B-. Short-term care ratings are vital for patients in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a vast spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the average facility. The hope is always that this does not adversely affect the quality of care. The last datapoint we assessed in this area is the number of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 3.3 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Moving on to the next category, we gave this nursing home a grade of D for long-term care. This was the facility's least impressive category grade. If you are looking for anything other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care scores. After we finished looking at the volume of care provided by nurses, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination record. We were optimistic to find that this nursing home vaccinates 98.51852 percent of its residents for pneumonia. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.