Pelican Pointe Healthcare and Rehabilitation

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This tells you CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home was given impressive grades in the area of long-term care as well. In fact, it received one of our most elite grades in that category with a score of A+. When facilities receive a grade in this range in long-term care it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is too frequently a dangerous illness for nursing home patients 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 patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Turning to the area of nursing care, this was not one of this facility's strong suits. We awarded it a grade of D in this category. Clearly, this facility performed much better in the categories discussed above. Our nursing score analyzes the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of skill of the nurses as well as the number of hours spent with residents. This place averaged a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is not a very impressive figure. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing ratings. This facility performed well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.

Turning to our fourth area, we gave this nursing home a grade of D in short-term care. This is the nursing home's worst category score. Naturally, this grade hurt the nursing home's overall profile a bit. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we look at a facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This score is considered to be a useful assessment of a facility's rehabilitation. It appears that this place was subpar in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its patients based on the staffing figures we assessed. The last measure we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 4.8 percent of its residents returning home. This was quite a bit below the national average.