The Terrace at Hobe Sound

In addition to being a top notch facility overall, this place also excelled in inspections, where it received an A. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with better scores in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This place was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies an immediate threat to resident health or safety. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

This nursing home also was awarded a top-shelf short-term care score. In fact, this turned out to be its second most impressive category score. In that category, we awarded this facility a score of A-. In determining our short-term care scores, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our objective is to create a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final metric we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that 5.5 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

In addition, this facility also received favorable nursing grades this year. In fact, we awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. Nursing ratings are tied to quality and quantity of nursing care. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility Florida in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of turning patients at least once a day.

In the last category we looked at, this facility was awarded a very favorable grade of B+ in our long-term care category. With this grade, the nursing home rounded out a very impressive report card. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 99.37888 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is too frequently a dangerous ailment for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a facility does not roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.