Solaris Healthcare Lake City

In addition to being a first rate facility overall, this facility also performed well in the area of long-term care, where it earned an A+. Few nursing homes fared better in this area. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care tend to provide residents with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. After considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is significantly higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home also received an A+ inspection score, making it one of the rare facilities to receive multiple A+'s in our categories. This is based on the facility's government inspections. Inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors did not consider 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 also performed well in the area of short-term care, where we gave it a score of A. Few facilities received a better grade in this category. Our short-term care grade is typically used to judge a facility's performance with rehabilitation To have high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.1 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

The last category we scored is nursing, where this facility was awarded a grade of B. Believe it or not, this turned out to be this nursing home's weakest category. A nursing home could be doing a lot worse when it's weakest grade still beats out most other nursing homes. We assessed the licensure of nurses working for the facility, in addition to the number of hours those nurses worked with residents, in determining our rating in this area. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these metrics as predictive indicators of the caliber of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.