Ponce Health and Rehabilitation Center

We also would like to point out the fact that this nursing home has earned nearly flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A in this area. Inspection ratings account for a host of factors found on a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we rely on is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better grades in this area typically have very few of these severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. When determining our nursing ratings, we look at both nursing hours and the skill levels of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures 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 place Florida in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of moving a patient even once per day.

Additionally, this facility also was given favorable short-term care grades this year. Indeed, we gave them one of our stronger scores in that area, with a grade of B+. Our short-term care grade is often used to measure a facility's rehabilitation services To provide highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide better levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we looked at in this area is the number of residents that ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that 4.8 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

The last category we rated is long-term care, where this nursing home received a grade of B+. This finished off a first-rate profile. Very few facilities received a B+ or higher in every category. When facilities receive this type of score in long-term care it is typically a good sign for resident care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses and aids. One of the data points we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccines. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to 99.77579 percent of its patients. This is a great way to avoid unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the senior population. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.