Life Care Center of Palm Bay

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Our inspection ratings account for a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better scores in this area tend to have very few severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that the government inspectors did not deem 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.

On the list of its many elite scores, this nursing home received a top-shelf short-term care score. In fact, we awarded it a score of A in this category. In the area of short-term care, we endeavor to evaluate indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We assess a nursing home's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and various therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.2 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Moving on our third category, this facility was given first-rate long-term care grade. In fact, we gave it a score of A- in this category. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. Once we finished looking at the quantity of nursing care, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia tragically can be a deadly ailment for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In the final category we assessed, this nursing home was awarded a very strong grade of B+ in our nursing category. With this score, the facility topped off a very strong report card. Our nursing rating is based on quite a few components, however, the primary one is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home 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.