Steward Sebastian River Medical Center

Steward Sebastian River Medical Center is a small nursing home located in Sebastian, Florida. This nursing home proved to be an A+ facility. Being awarded an A+ in our rating scheme requires superb scores across the board. We were so impressed with this facility that we ranked it in the top one percentile of all facilities in the country. Headlining this place's remarkable report card is its short-term care score, which is addressed in the next section.

One of the reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it earned an A+ in short-term care. Our short-term care ratings are vital for residents looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires more skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a wide scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Remarkably, this nursing home provides about 50% more services from physical therapists and registered nurses than most nursing homes we looked at. This is a very favorable sign. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients that returned home from this facility. On top of excelling in the area of physical therapy staffing, we found that it performed as well as just about any nursing home in the country with 64.2 percent of its residents returning home. Most nursing homes are below 50 percent in this statistic.

This first-rate facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. We scrutinized the licensure of nurses working for the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of hours those nurses spent with patients, in computing our score in this area. This facility provided 6.8 hours of nursing care per resident each day, which is among the higher figures in the country. A significant portion of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are one of the most skilled levels of nurses. We are very impressed by these statistics. In addition to providing impressive levels of care, this nursing home also excelled in the quality measures we assessed. It performed as well as any nursing home in the country when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.

Continuing with its amazing performance, this nursing home also received an A+ inspection rating. This grade is based on the facility's recent inspection reports. An A+ in this category is one of the highest complements we can pay to a facility. Our inspection grades account for several factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher grades in this area usually have few severe deficiencies. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The final category we looked at was long-term care. We gave it another impressive grade of A+ in this category. This completed a amazing profile of four A+'s. If you are seeking anything other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care ratings. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Unfortunately, we weren't able to find this place's vaccination data. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.