Gulf Coast Medical Center Skilled Nursing Unit

To go along with its favorable overall grade, we gave this facility a grade of A+ for inspections. Our inspection grades are based on many pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this category typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Unfortunately, it does not appear that we were able to find information on deficiency's for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also was given an A+ short-term care grade, making it one of the few nursing homes to be given multiple A+ category scores. In computing our short-term care scores, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our goal is to create a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Remarkably, this nursing home provides about 50% more services from physical therapists and registered nurses than most nursing homes we looked at. This is a very favorable sign. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who ultimately returned home from this facility. In addition to excelling in the area of physical therapy hours, we found that it fared as well as just about any facility in the country with 72.7 percent of its patients returning home.

Adding to its high-end profile, this nursing home also was given a superb long-term care grade, with a score of A. If you are looking for anything other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care scores. After assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. Unfortunately, we weren't able to locate information on vaccination rates. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In the last area, this facility also was awarded a very strong nursing rating, with a grade of A. This rounded out a rare straight A profile. Nursing ratings are primarily tied to a facility's level of nurse staffing. This facility boasts a really impressive 5.9 hours of nursing care per resident daily, of which a significant percentage of those hours were provided by registered nurses. This is one of the most highly trained levels of nurses. On top of providing high levels of nursing care, this facility also excelled in the quality measures we looked at. It performed as well as any nursing home in the country in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.