Sunterra Springs Independence

In addition to faring well overall, this nursing home received even higher grades for short-term care. It earned one of our best grades in that area with a score of A. Short-term care scores are based on the nursing home's quantity of skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This includes a broad range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.3 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

In addition, this nursing home also performed well in inspections, which is based on its inspection reports. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that area. Our inspection grades are based on several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspections. Places that receive favorable grades in this area have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This facility was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to be an imminent threat to resident safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B+. In computing a facility's nursing grade, we look at the number of hours nurses are with residents and the skill levels of those nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at 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 facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of moving residents more frequently.

This facility's worst category was long-term care, which is the last category we analyzed. For this category, we awarded this facility an D. We wanted to draw your attention to this possible area of weakness, however, you should not dwell on a single weak category either. When facilities receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means the facility didn't perform well in our measures relating to patient care. After looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. Unfortunately, it does not look like this nursing home submitted vaccination data. Surprisingly, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. This is its best feature in this category.