Warm Beach Health Care Center

In addition to being a quality nursing home overall, this nursing home really excelled in long-term care, where it earned an A+. Few nursing homes did better in this category. 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 considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is too frequently a deadly health condition for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A+. Nursing ratings are primarily based on a facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.5 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 place the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of turning residents more frequently.

This nursing home fared well in the area of short-term care also. For this reason, we gave it a score of A for that area, which is one of our highest scores. Short-term care grades are generally used to assess a nursing home's rehabilitation services To provide good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to feature higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Finally, turning to our inspection category, we gave this facility a C. Our inspection rating is based on the facility's government inspection reports. Although this is not a bad grade, it is this facility's weakest area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection ratings. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are relatively insignificant. This facility had 9 deficiencies on its government inspection report, but fortunately none were in categories J through L. This means that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to place patient safety or health in immediate harm or jeopardy. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.