Santa Marta

On top of receiving a strong overall rating, this nursing home earned an A+ inspection score. This is based on the facility's recent government inspections. An A+ in this category is one of the best complements we can pay to a nursing home. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this category most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. Our nursing grade is mostly based on the facility's level of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility 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 state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of moving residents even once per day.

Turning the page to our third area, this top-shelf facility also performed remarkably in the category of long-term care. In this area, it received a A+. Only a small group of nursing homes fared better in this area. Nursing homes that receive this kind of grade in long-term care tend to provide consistent around the clock care to make sure residents are well cared for. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 95.918365 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is too frequently a dangerous ailment for nursing home residents so we like it when a facility does not leave this to chance. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In our last category, this facility was given another A+ for its short-term care rating, wrapping up a truly spectacular profile of straight A+'s in all four categories. Short-term care grades are typically employed to grade a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to feature higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final statistic we assessed in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 6.2 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.