NSPIRE Healthcare Miami Lakes

In addition to being a first rate facility overall, this facility also performed well in the area of inspections, where it earned a grade of A+. Few nursing homes performed this well in this area. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with better scores in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also was given a dominant short-term care score. In fact, this turned out to be this nursing home's second strongest category score. In that category, we gave this facility a grade of A. Our short-term care grades are based in part on the nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a broad range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, in addition to other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number of patients that ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 5.8 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

Moving on our third area, this facility received a strong long-term care grade. In fact, it received a score of A- in this area. Nursing homes that receive this kind of grade in long-term care tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure patients are kept in good health. After we finished looking at the volume of nursing care, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 99.5671 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia can be a dangerous condition for nursing home patients so we like it when a nursing home does not roll the dice on this issue. 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 less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The final category we assessed was nursing. We gave this nursing home one of our higher grades in that area, with a grade of B. Even though this wasn't as strong as many of its other grades, it is still a fine grade. Our nursing rating includes a variety of subcategories. The most heavily weighted one is the quantity of hours nurses spent with residents. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these areas as good measures of the caliber of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.