Hawthorne Health and Rehab of Sarasota

One of the reasons this proved to be a great facility is that it received a very impressive long-term care rating. In that area, we gave this nursing home an A. Nursing homes that excel in this category tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. One of the datapoints we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccinations. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. This is a reliable method to minimize 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 residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

On the list of its many impressive grades, this nursing home was awarded a top-shelf short-term care grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in this area. In determining our short-term care ratings, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our goal is to devise a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.2 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

This facility also received excellent government inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our best scores in that category, with an A. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively minor. This particular nursing home received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Switching gears to the next area, this facility also excelled in the nursing category. We awarded it a B+ in this area. This finalized a very impressive profile. Our nursing rating focuses on the facility's level of nurse staffing. We factor in both the levels of training of the nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these metrics as good indicators of the quality of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.