Groves Center

With an address in Lake Wales, Florida, Groves Center is one of a mere two nursing homes in this city. We gave it an overall grade of C, which is a middle of the road score. In our view, this facility would be a good fit for most people. One of the best aspects of this facility's report card is its remarkable inspection rating, which is addressed in the next paragraph.

This facility received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its nearly flawless inspections in recent years. We gave them an A in this category. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This facility was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that the inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies to pose an immediate threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This nursing home's second best area is long-term care. We awarded it a C in this category. This is basically a middle of the road score in this category. Our long-term care scores are more meaningful for those requiring more conventional services associated with activities of daily living. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is better than most nursing homes. This facility keeps its patients out of the hospital. It had only 1.53 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days.

This nursing home was given its third highest category score in the category of short-term care. We awarded this nursing home a C in this area, which is a respectable score. In the category of short-term care, we seek to evaluate indicators of a facility's rehabilitation services. We assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and various therapists. We found that this nursing home was below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. It provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. The last metric we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 36.2 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is below average.

Moving on to the fourth category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of D in the area of nursing. This was the facility's least impressive category grade. The nursing rating weighs several factors, most of which are tied to quantities of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 3.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is slightly below average. To go along with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this nursing home also did not perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing scores. We looked at the percentage of patients experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This nursing home had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average facility. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These scores pulled down this facility's nursing grade significantly.