Gulf Coast Medical Center Skilled Nursing Unit

One of the reasons this ended up being a great nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical area. Inspection grades are tied to items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this category tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. We weren't able to locate information about this nursing home's deficiencies. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This top-shelf nursing home also excelled in the category of short-term care, where it received a grade of A+. Very few nursing homes performed better in this area. Short-term care scores are critical for individuals looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes additional skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes a vast scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. This nursing home employs both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities employ these skilled professionals. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients that ultimately were able to return home from this facility. We found that 6.6 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Compounding its strong resume, this nursing home also received an excellent long-term care score, with a score of A. If you are looking for anything other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care ratings. One of the datapoints we considered after nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. Unfortunately, it does not appear that this nursing home provided information about vaccinations. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Turning to our next area, this nursing home also excelled in the nursing category. In fact, we awarded it an A for this category. This rounded out truly elite report card. Our nursing score is mostly based on the nursing home's nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.