Fort Walton Rehabilitation Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Arguably the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This means the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

An additional strong feature for this facility is that it received a favorable long-term care grade. In fact, this ended up being its second best category grade. In that area, we gave this nursing home a B+. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia tragically can be a life or death health condition for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't take any chances. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home was given an impressive short-term care score as well. We gave it one of our higher grades in that category with a score of B. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to gauge a nursing home's rehabilitation services In order to have highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. We were not able to track down information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.2 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

The last area we analyzed ended up being this facility's poorest category. However, even in its worst category we still gave it a respectable grade of C in nursing. Our nursing score consists of many subcategories, many of which are associated with nursing hours. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, our nursing ratings also factor in quality-based metrics, such as preventing major falls. Although this facility didn't have as many nursing hours per resident as many other facilities we looked at, it was still better than average in the area of preventing major falls. This is often a good indicator of how carefully a facility's nursing staff is tending to its residents. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses and safety protocols are in place.