Willowbrooke Court at Azalea Trace

We also wanted to emphasize that this facility earned near flawless government inspections recently. We gave them an A+ in this area. Arguably the most significant factor we consider in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In addition, this facility was given strong marks in the area of long-term care. As a result, it was given one of our most impressive scores in that area with a grade of A+. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary objective is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. After assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 91.9708 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which happens to be a few points lower than we expected but still a decent figure. This place was also able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 1.36 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days.

Moving on our third area, this top-shelf facility also dominated in the area of short-term care. In this category, we awarded it a A+. Very few nursing homes fared better in this area. In computing our short-term care ratings, we look at the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This grade is generally a useful assessment of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Remarkably, this place provides approximately 1.5 times as many hours of services from physical therapists and registered nurses than most facilities we looked at. The last datapoint we assessed in this category is the number of patients who eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that it fared as well as just about any facility in Florida in this area with 65.9 percent of its patients returning home.

In the final area, we gave this nursing home an A+ for our nursing grade. This rounded out a very impressive profile. In calculating our nursing grades, we assess both staffing levels and the skill levels of those nurses. This nursing home boasts a really impressive 4.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day, 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. This is one of the higher totals of nursing hours we found at any facility. On top of providing impressive levels of nursing care, this facility also excelled in several of the quality measures we assessed. With below five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home Florida in this category. This is generally an indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Many pressure ulcers can be avoided by providing better nursing care and a policy of moving patients even once per day.