Westminster Woods on Julington Creek

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Arguably the most significant factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with higher grades in this category most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also would like to point out the fact that this nursing home received a superb score of A in our short-term care category. With our short-term care rating, we try to craft a valuable gauge for rehabilitation. In this process, we analyze the nursing home's offerings of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. This nursing home is the gold standard in terms of skilled nursing staffing. It supplied about 50% more physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than the average nursing home. This is what we look for when assessing a facility in this category. The last measure we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it fared as well as just about any facility in Florida in this area with 60.5 percent of its residents returning home. With most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Our nursing rating is based on a handful of components, most of which are tied to quantities of nurse staffing. This nursing home boasts a really impressive 4.1 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, of which a significant portion of those hours were provided by registered nurses. This is one of the most highly highly trained levels of nurses. In addition to looking at levels of nursing care, we also looked at a few quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these areas as predictive measures of the caliber of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

The last area we scored was long-term care, where this facility was awarded a grade of B+. This wrapped up a very impressive report card. Not many facilities received a B+ or higher in all four categories. In a long-term care setting, the primary goal is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. Even though we determined this nursing home had an impressive volume of nursing hours provided by nurses and other nursing staff, we found its vaccine statistics to be somewhat slightly lower than we anticipated. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to just 90 percent of its patients. This is one statistic we would love to see this facility improve on. Clearly, this nursing home 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 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.