Palms Care Center

On top of receiving a terrible overall score, we also gave this nursing home weak scores across the board in the various categories. In fact, it received just a D for its nursing score, which is its best grade. When determining a facility's nursing score, we assess the number of hours nurses commit to patients and the skill levels of the nurses. This facility averages 0.2 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis, which is below average. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing scores. This nursing home performed well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these metrics to be good measures of the quality of nursing care.

We also wanted to point out this facility's inspection score where it received a lowly F. This usually means we found some major red flags on its inspection reports. When a facility has this poor of an inspection score, you should look for severe deficiencies on its inspection report. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to the well being of residents. This particular facility was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only positive thing we can say is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they created a threat to resident safety or health. Finally, we also want to point out that this place received significant government fines totaling over $100,000. This generally means that a nursing home'spoor performance has been an issue for multiple years.

In our next category, we gave this facility a rock-bottom F in the category of short-term care. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we assess the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This area is frequently a useful measure of a facility's rehabilitation services. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 5.2 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. At most facilities, around half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.

The next area we rated is long-term care, in which this facility was given an abysmal score here as well. We gave it a lowly F in this category, which is obviously very concerning. Facilities that do not score well in long-term care often do not provide as much nursing care and also may be struggling in some of the areas of routine medical care we looked at. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 93.47826 percent of its patients. This is a few points less than we expected but still a reasonably acceptable figure. To our surprise, this place actually fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.