Southern Oaks Care Center

Southern Oaks Care Center is a very-large nursing home located in Pensacola, Florida. This nursing home received an overall grade of B-, which is a solid grade. This facility seems to have some things working in its favor. The best part of this nursing home's profile is its stellar inspection score. Inspection grades are discussed in the next paragraph.

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in the category of inspections, where it received a grade of A+. Few facilities performed better in this category. Our inspection grades are based on items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this category typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This place received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered severe. This indicates that the inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

This facility's second best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B-. In computing a nursing home's nursing score, we assess the number of hours nurses commit to patients as well as the level of licensure of those nurses. This place offers extremely high levels of nursing care, averaging 4.1 hours per patient daily. This is well above average. Lastly, we also factored some quality-based metrics into our nursing grades. Specifically, we looked at the percent of residents who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these areas as predictive indicators of the quality of nursing care, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

This nursing home was given its next highest category score in the category of long-term care. We awarded this facility a B- in this category, which is an acceptable score. Long-term care grades are generally used to measure a nursing home's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services offered by a rehabilitation facility. On top of providing very solid levels of nurse staffing, this facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 99.864685 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 1.44 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes.

The last category we looked at was short-term care. For that category, we awarded this facility a grade of C. In our short-term care score, we attempt to create a fair measure for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we analyze the nursing home's offerings of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, this nursing home offers both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities offer both. The last statistic we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 24.9 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is actually below average.