Lee Memorial Hospital Skilled Nursing Unit

Lee Memorial Hospital Skilled Nursing Unit is a very-small hospital-based nursing home in Fort Myers, Florida. After receiving an A+ overall grade, this facility has the prestigious distinction of being one of the top 25 facilities in Florida. Even in a city featuring 15 other nursing homes, this facility is a great option. Keep reading to see this nursing home's category scores, which also impressed us. You just can't do any better than a straight A profile.

In addition to receiving a great overall score, this nursing home received an A+ in our short-term care category. With our short-term care grade, we try to create a valuable gauge for rehabilitation. In this process, we assess a facility's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. This place excelled at the highest level in two key staffing areas we looked at. In fact, it provided about 50% more care from registered nurses and physical therapists than the average nursing home. This is usually a great sign. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents that ultimately returned home from this facility. In addition to excelling in the area of physical therapy staffing, we found that it fared as well as just about any facility in the country with 71.7 percent of its patients returning home.

This facility also earned an A+ inspection score, making it one of the rare places to receive multiple A+'s in our categories. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with better scores in this category typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Unfortunately, it does not appear that we were able to find information about this nursing home's deficiencies. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also gave this nursing home a of A+ for its long-term care grade. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. After assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. We were not able to track down this facility's vaccination rates. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Turning to the last area, this facility also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it an A in this category. This finalized a straight A profile. Our nursing score is based on many data points. The most important one is the amount of time nurses spent with patients. This nursing home provided 7 hours of nursing care per patient daily, which is among the higher figures in the country. A significant percentage of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are one of the most highly skilled levels of nurses. We were very impressed by both of these figures. In addition to offering high levels of nursing care, this facility also excelled in the quality-based metrics we assessed. For example, it performed as well as any facility in the country in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these statistics as reliable measures of the caliber of nursing care offered.