Gulfport Care Center

In addition to receiving a strong overall rating, this facility performed even better in our inspections category which is based on the facility's recent government inspection reports. In fact, we gave it an A+ for that category, which is one of our best grades. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This particular nursing home received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it received a dominant long-term care grade. Indeed, long-term care turned out to be its second highest category grade. In that category, we awarded this facility a grade of A. Facilities that excel in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. One of the datapoints we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 94.73684 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a proven method to avoid unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the aged 65 and up population. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Turning to the category of nursing care, this facility didn't perform quite as well in this area as some of the categories discussed above. Nevertheless, a grade of B- in this category is by no means a bad score. Our nursing grade weighs many factors, however, the most important consideration is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This figure is far below average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home surprisingly excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. It scored well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.

Moving on to our last area, we awarded this facility a D in our short-term care category. This was the facility's weakest category score. Sadly, this grade hurt the nursing home's overall profile a bit. Short-term care grades are important for residents seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically mandates additional skilled nursing. This includes a vast scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Unfortunately, we discovered that this nursing home provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The final datapoint we considered in this category is the number of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 4.8 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, this was well below the national average.