Summerfield Health Care Center

This facility earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its nearly flawless health inspections in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. These inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also was given a favorable long-term care grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of B+ in this area, which happens to be one of our more favorable scores. Facilities that do well in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. One of the factors we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccinations. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a great way to minimize unnecessary deaths for the aged 65 and up population. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home in any area came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of C. We weighed the levels of nurses employed by the facility, in addition to the number of hours the nurses were with residents, in calculating our score in this category. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Lastly, although this facility got dinged a bit for nursing hours, it excelled in a few of our quality-based metrics. With less than five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it performed very well in this statistic.

The next category we scored is short-term care. It received an F for this category, which is a bottom of the barrel score. This is clearly a significant concern. With our short-term care category, we try to forge a fair gauge for rehabilitation. In doing so, we assess a facility's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. In this nursing home's case, we found that it provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who returned home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.