Springs at Boca Ciega Bay

In addition to being a first-rate nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in our short-term care rating, where it received an A+. In calculating our short-term care scores, we assess the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This grade is considered to be a meaningful measure of a facility's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last item we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to return home from the facility. We found that 6.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Adding to an already impressive profile, this facility also received virtually flawless health inspections in recent years. As a result, we awarded it an A+ inspection grade. Arguably the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This place received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This indicates that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to create an imminent threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The next category we assessed is long-term care. Contributing to its dominant resume, this facility also excelled in this category. In fact, we awarded it a of A- in the category. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia can be a life threatening health condition for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a facility does not roll the dice on this issue. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

In the final category we rated, this facility was given a very strong grade of A- in our nursing category. With this grade, the nursing home topped off a straight A profile. We scrutinized the skill-level of nurses employed by the facility, as well as the quantity of hours those nurses spent with patients, in computing our score in this category. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.