Palm Garden of Vero Beach

On top of being a top notch facility overall, this place also performed well in the area of inspections, where it earned an A. Not many facilities performed better in this area. These inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This nursing home was assessed 8 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to create an immediate threat to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

On the list of its many dominant grades, this nursing home received a top-shelf short-term care score. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- in this area. Short-term care scores are crucial for individuals requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a wide scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last datapoint we looked at in this category is the number of residents that ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that 5.8 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

This facility also was given a very strong long-term care score. This actually is this nursing home's third strongest category grade. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of A-. Nursing homes that do well in this category typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. On top of considering the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is too frequently a dangerous ailment for nursing home residents so we like it when a facility does not take any chances. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Switching gears to our next area, this nursing home was awarded an excellent nursing grade. We awarded it a B+ in that category, completing one of our more favorable profiles. When computing a nursing home's nursing rating, we look at the quantity of hours nurses are caring for patients as well as the level of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these data points as predictive measures of the caliber of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.