Steward Sebastian River Medical Center

To pair with its strong overall score, we awarded this nursing home an A+ for its short-term care score. In determining our short-term care scores, we analyze the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This category is more often than not a meaningful measure of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 7.1 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

We also awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. Our nursing score weighs a handful of factors, most of which are associated with nursing hours. This nursing home provides 0.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of turning residents at least once a day.

This facility also was awarded a very strong long-term care grade. In fact, this turned out to be its third most impressive category grade. In that area, this facility received a grade of A. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. One of the datapoints we considered on top of nurse's aid hours was vaccinations. It does not look like this nursing home provided information about vaccinations. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Another impressive feature for this facility is its inspection grade. In that area, we gave this facility an A-, completing its straight A performance. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this area typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this facility had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.