Plymouth Harbor

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Arguably the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. Nursing grades are primarily associated with the facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility Florida in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a system of moving patients even once per day.

Turning our next category, this high end facility also excelled in the category of short-term care. In this area, we gave it a A+. Very few facilities fared better in this area. Short-term care ratings are crucial for people requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing services. This means a broad scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final statistic we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients that eventually returned home from the facility. We found that 6.7 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

In our final category, this facility also received an A+ for its long-term care rating, finishing off a truly spectacular profile of straight A+'s in each of our categories. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. Once we concluded our assessment of the amount of care provided by nurses, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly can be a dangerous ailment for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home does not roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.