Palm Garden of Tampa

On top of being a first rate nursing home overall, it also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A. Few facilities performed better in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be quite minor. This nursing home was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies to create an immediate threat to resident safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

This nursing home also excelled in the area of long-term care, where we awarded it a score of A-. Not many facilities received a better grade in this category. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in this category it generally means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 99.66216 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly is often a life or death condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility does not leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Turning to another strength for this nursing home, we gave them one of our stronger grades in our short-term care category as well, with a B+. Our short-term care scores are thought to be most critical for those requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally mandates higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. This means not only nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. We were not able to find information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.2 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

The last area we analyzed is nursing, where this facility was given a B. Even though this wound up being its worst category score, this is nevertheless a favorable grade. Our nursing grade considers many data points. The most heavily weighted factor is the number of hours nurses spend with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at a few quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This place excelled in these areas, with excellent scores for minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. These areas are generally reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care a facility provides.