The Rehabilitation Center at the Palazzo

One of the reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received a strong short-term care score. In that category, we gave this facility an A. Our short-term care scores are arguably most meaningful for folks needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients that were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 6 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

Adding to its impressive category scores, this facility excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This means that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- in that category. When determining our nursing ratings, we look at both staffing levels and the training levels of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can typically be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

In the final category, we gave this facility an A for our long-term care rating. This rounded out a first-rate report card. Nursing homes that do well in this category typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 96.37681 percent of its residents, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia can be a life threatening condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home does not take any chances. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.