Two Palms Care Center

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home also earned top notch health inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our higher scores in this area, with an A. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with better scores in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This facility received 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that CMS didn't consider any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among this nursing home's other achievements is its high-end long-term care grade. It received one of our more impressive grades in that category, with a score of A. Facilities that excel in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 94.0594 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is too frequently a deadly illness for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of B-. While this didn't quite match its scores in some of the categories discussed above, this is still a decent score. In determining a facility's nursing rating, we consider the number of hours nurses commit to residents as well as the levels of training of the nurses. This facility averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily, which is a very low figure. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home actually excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. It scored well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these areas to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the quantity of hours of care offered.

Moving on to our fourth category, we awarded this facility a D for short-term care. This is the nursing home's weakest category rating. Of course, this category hurt the nursing home's overall grade a bit. Short-term care grades are based on the nursing home's quantity of skilled nursing services. This means a broad range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, not to mention other types of therapy. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. This definitely wasn't a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 5.3 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, about half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.