Palms Care Center

Neither this nursing home's overall grade nor its category grades gave us much to highlight here. Its best category was long-term care, but even there it received just a D. This is still a well below average grade. When facilities receive a grade in this range in long-term care it generally means the nursing home didn't perform well in our measures relating to patient care. One of the factors we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours is vaccines. Candidly, we were a bit bothered by the fact that this facility administered the pneumonia vaccination to a relatively low 77.36842 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This is its best score in this category.

Sadly, this place's next best category was inspections, but even there it earned a D. This is still a well below average grade. Inspection scores account for several factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. Generally, you should be most cautious when considering a facility with severe deficiencies on a recent inspection report. This nursing home had 3 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only positive thing we can say is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that suggest they caused a threat to patient safety or health. Lastly, we also need to point out that this nursing home received significant government fines in recent years totaling over $100,000. This generally suggests that a nursing home'sbad track record spanned more than one year.

Unfortunately, this facility only received a grade of D for its nursing grade, which was actually one of its better category grades. Nursing ratings are heavily correlated with levels of nurse staffing. With just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, this facility's nurse staffing levels were significantly below average. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing scores. This place performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these metrics to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care.

The next area we analyzed is short-term care, in which this nursing home was given a very poor score in this category also. It received an F for this area, which is definitely a major disappointment. Short-term care scores are critical for prospective residents requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates additional skilled nursing. This means a vast range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. With its abysmal grade in this category, we weren't shocked to learn this facility offered far fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most nursing homes. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients that returned home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 5.2 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.