Solaris Healthcare Merritt Island

In addition to faring well overall, this facility earned an excellent inspection report. As a result, we gave it one of our highest grades in this category with an A. Inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This facility was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that the inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies an immediate risk to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

To add to its high-end accomplishments in other areas, we gave this nursing home a grade of A for its short-term care grade. Short-term care scores are crucial for individuals seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes additional skilled nursing services. This means a broad scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we considered in this area is the number of residents that ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that 6.4 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

This facility also was strong in the area of long-term care, where it received a score of A-. Few nursing homes received a better grade in this area. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. Once we assessed the volume of nursing care, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia tragically can be a life or death ailment for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In the last category we graded, this nursing home was given an impressive grade grade of A- in our nursing category. With this grade, the nursing home rounded out a straight A report card. The nursing score weighs a variety of data points. The most heavily weighted factor is the number of hours nurses spent with residents. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these data points as good measures of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.