Signature Healthcare of Palm Beach

While this facility earned a decent overall rating, its inspections rating is notably better than its overall score. Due to a strong health inspection report this year, it received one of our better scores in that category with a B+. Our inspection ratings weigh a host of factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better grades in this category typically have few severe deficiencies. This nursing home received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to resident health or safety. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

In addition, we also would like to point out that this facility was given positive short-term care marks in this assessment. We gave them one of our more favorable scores in this category, with a B+. This proved to be the facility's second strongest score. Our short-term care scores are presumably most critical for folks requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more skilled nursing. This includes not just nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of patients that ultimately returned home from this facility. We found that 5.2 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This facility's third most favorable category turned out to be its long-term care score, where it received a grade of C. If you are looking for services other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care scores. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Fortunately, this facility administered the vaccine to 97.31544 percent of its residents, which is an above average total. Finally, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Turning to the next area, we awarded this facility a grade of D for the area of nursing. This was the nursing home's least impressive category grade. Sadly, this category hurt the facility's overall profile to a certain degree. Our nursing rating is mostly tied to a nursing home's nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. In addition to receiving below average scores for total nursing hours, this nursing home was less impressive in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in calculating our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and found that this nursing home was at approximately 1.5 times the national average in this statistic. This is a bad sign when you consider that many pressure ulcers are preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, this statistic dragged down this nursing home's nursing rating significantly.