Life Care Center of Pensacola

Life Care Center of Pensacola is an average-sized facility in Pensacola, Florida. This facility is one of the highest-graded nursing homes we found. A grade in this range requires first-rate scores across the board. Despite Pensacola offering 14 other nursing homes to select from, this facility managed to stand out as a great option. Headlining this facility's remarkable profile is its inspection score, which is addressed in the next paragraph.

In addition to receiving a strong overall rating, this facility also received an A+ inspection rating. This grade is based on the facility's recent inspection reports. An A+ in this category is one of the best complements we can offer a facility. Inspection ratings weigh several factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with better scores in this category generally have few severe deficiencies. While this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its high-end resume, this nursing home also excelled in our short-term care category. In fact, we awarded it a score of A for that category. Short-term care ratings are meaningful for individuals needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires more skilled nursing. This includes a vast scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. When we looked at this facility's physical therapist hours, we found it offered more hours of physical therapy per day to its residents than most nursing homes. The final statistic we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it fared as well as just about any facility in Florida in this area with 61.7 percent of its residents returning home. For most facilities, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return home.

We also would like to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home received a superb score of A in our long-term care category. When facilities receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. In addition to offering very favorable levels of nursing care, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. The last datapoint we looked at was its hospitalization rate. While it had 2.82 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, its risk adjusted score was close to the middle of the pack since it had some more complicated patients.

The last area we graded is nursing, in which this facility was awarded a grade of B. Even though this wound up being its worst category rating, this is still a strong score. Our nursing category assesses quite a few components, many of which are based on levels of nurse staffing. This place offers extremely high levels of nursing care, averaging 4.1 hours per patient daily. This is more nursing care than nearly any other nursing home offers. Finally, this place also performed well in several of the quality measures we assessed. In terms of the number of its patients suffering falls which lead to major injury, this place performed better than the national average.