Stuart Rehabilitation and Healthcare

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. This proved to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of A. Nursing scores are primarily based on the facility's nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures 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 place the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of moving residents more often.

This facility also was strong in the area of short-term care, where we awarded it a grade of A. Very few nursing homes fared better in this area. Our short-term care grades are considered to be more important for people needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. This means not just nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last statistic we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that 5.8 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

The last category we graded is long-term care, where this facility was awarded a grade of A. This wrapped up a very impressive profile. Only a select few nursing homes earned an A- or better in every single category. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. After assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is far higher than most nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.