Palm Garden of Gainesville

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is it earned an impressive inspection grade. Inspections turned out to be its best category. In this category, we awarded this facility an A. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with higher grades in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This place was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that the government inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies to cause an immediate threat to patient health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility was given a high-end grade of A in our short-term care category. Short-term care grades are typically used to measure a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to provide quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide better levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final metric we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 6.1 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

Turning to the next category, this facility also earned a score of B+ for its long-term care rating. This is a well above average score in this category. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. After considering the volume of nursing care, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 99.040764 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia tragically can be a life or death illness for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility doesn't take any chances. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The last category we assessed is nursing, in which this facility received a B-. Although this ended up being its worst category score, this is still not the end of the world. The nursing rating weighs a host of factors. The most important factor is the number of hours nurses spend with patients. This facility provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is a lower figure than we were hoping for. Lastly, we look at quality-based statistics, such as the percent of residents who experienced pressure ulcers and major falls. Sometimes these data points are indicators of the quality of nursing care.