Palm Grove Health Care

To go along with its impressive overall grade, we awarded this nursing home an A- for our nursing grade. Nursing grades are based largely on levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving a resident at least once a day.

In addition, this facility excelled in inspections, where it earned a grade of A-. Our inspection ratings are tied to several items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this category tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This place was hit with 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

The next area we looked at was long-term care. This facility received an impressive long-term care grade, with a B+ in this category. When nursing homes receive this kind of grade in long-term care it is a good sign for patient care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses aids. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is far higher than most nursing homes. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Turning to the final area, this nursing home received a strong short-term care grade. This facility didn't turn out to have any weak categories. In computing our short-term care grades, we size up the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This rating is generally a meaningful measure of the facility's rehabilitation services. It doesn't look like this facility provided data regarding its registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The last measure we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.