Life Care Center of Sarasota

We also found that this facility excelled in our short-term care rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Short-term care grades are typically employed to gauge a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to have highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This nursing home is above the national average both in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents. These are generally good indicators of quality short-term care. The last datapoint we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients that were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that it fared as well as just about any facility in Florida in this area with 66 percent of its patients returning home.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category. The nursing rating weighs many datapoints, but the most important consideration is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This place boasts a really impressive 4.1 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis, of which a significant percentage was provided by registered nurses. This is one of the more highly trained levels of nurses. This is one of the higher totals of nursing hours we found at any facility. On top of offering impressive levels of care, this facility was also above average in several of the major quality measures we assessed in this category. By way of illustration, it performed well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. These areas are generally good measures of the quality of nursing care a nursing home offers.

This facility also performed well in the area of inspections. It received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. It received one of our highest grades in that category with a grade of B+. Our inspection scores account for a host of factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we consider is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher grades in this category generally have very few severe deficiencies. While this facility had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

The next area we graded was this nursing home's weakest area. However, even in its weakest link we still awarded it a decent grade of B- in long-term care. In our long-term care category, we focus on the quantity of care provided by a facility, as well as some quality measures. After assessing the very respectable amount of nursing hours provided by this facility, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 99.590164 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which appears to be higher than the average nursing home. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Although it had 1.94 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, its risk adjusted metric was better than most nursing homes since it had more complicated patients.