Heartland Health Care Center Boynton Beach

To pair with a favorable overall grade, we gave this place an A+ for inspections. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection scores. One of those factors is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be relatively insignificant. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility received strong marks in the category of long-term care as well. Consequently, we awarded it one of our most elite scores in that category with a score of A. When facilities receive this type of score in long-term care it is usually a good sign for resident care and indicates that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. One of the datapoints we considered after nursing hours is vaccinations. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a great way to avoid unnecessary hospitalizations for the elderly population. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility received a very good nursing grade this year as well. It received one of our better scores in that category with a grade of B. Our nursing grade is primarily based on the nursing home's nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility Florida in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving patients more often.

The last category we graded is short-term care, in which this facility was given a C. Even though this turned out to be its lowest category rating, this is still not a bad grade. Our short-term care grades are based in part on a facility's quantity of highly-skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a wide scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who who were able to eventually return home from this facility. We found that 2.5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was actually quite a bit below the national average.