Terrace of Hialeah

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Arguably the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this category most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also was superb in the area of long-term care, where it received a grade of A. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. When facilities receive a grade in this range in this category it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. One of the statistics we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccines. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to 99.12377 percent of its patients. This is a proven method to avoid negative health outcomes for the nursing home population. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A- in our nursing category. There are several factors within this category. Most of the subcategories are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The last category we graded was short-term care, in which this nursing home was awarded a grade of C. Even though this turned out to be its weakest category rating, this is nevertheless not a terrible score. Our short-term care grade is often used to assess a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to provide quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we looked at in this category is the number of residents who eventually returned home from the facility. We found that just 2.1 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. This figure was below the national average.