Palm Garden of Port Saint Lucie

One of the reasons this ended up being a quality nursing home is that it earned an impressive inspection grade. In fact, inspections turned out to be its best category. In this category, we gave this facility an A. These inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this place had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you 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. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. In computing our nursing grades, we weigh both staffing levels and the training levels of the nurses. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Turning to an additional strength for this facility, we gave them one of our more favorable grades in our short-term care category as well, with a grade of B+. Our short-term care scores are meaningful for patients requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a vast scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 4.8 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

In the last category, this facility also was awarded a first-rate long-term care grade, with a B+. This completed an elite profile. When facilities receive a grade in this range in this category it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 98.233215 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.