Heartland of Tamarac

Heartland of Tamarac is in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The city has many options. We gave it an overall grade of B-, which is a middle of the road rating. Based on all of the relevant data, there are certainly much worse facilities out there. One of the better aspects of this nursing home's report card is its impressive inspection reports, which you can find in the next section.

The main reason this nursing home received a decent overall grade is its excellent inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our better grades in that category, with a grade of A-. This is a notably better score than the place's overall score, which was decent but certainly not elite. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some are relatively insignificant. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple relatively minor dings aren't something to panic about.

Another one of this nursing home's higher category grades was in the area of short-term care. In that area, we awarded this facility a B. It actually outperformed most facilities in this area. In computing these short-term care ratings, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our objective is to devise a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. One reason for this facility's strong score in this category is that it provides more care with registered nurses to its residents than the average nursing home. The final datapoint we assessed in this category is the number of patients that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that it fared better than most nursing homes in this area with 49.3 percent of its residents returning home.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. Our nursing score includes several components, however, the paramount consideration is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home averages 3.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grade also includes applicable quality-based metrics. While this place excelled in terms of quantity of nursing hours, it lagged a bit in certain datapoints that focused on quality. This facility's nursing rating was hurt by its subpar performance in the area of minimizing pressure ulcers. In fact, we found that 16.7 percent of this nursing home's patients suffered from pressure ulcers. Since some pressure ulcers could be avoided with sufficient nursing protocols, we reduce a nursing home's nursing score when we see this kind of prevalence of pressure ulcers.

This nursing home's least impressive area is long-term care, which is the last area we assessed. For this category, we awarded this nursing home a D. In a long-term care environment, the primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 96.99454 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is more than most nursing homes. Finally, we looked at the nursing home's number of hospitalizations. We found that this place had 2.58 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, this figure is not nearly as favorable than its vaccination record.