Willowbrooke Court at Indian River Estates

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ in short-term care. In forming our short-term care grades, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to formulate a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.5 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Contributing to its first-rate assessment, this facility also was given a strong long-term care score, with a grade of A. When facilities receive this kind of score in this category it is a good sign for patient care and indicates that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. On top of considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 99.6633 percent of its patients, which is far higher than most nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- in that category. The nursing rating weighs quite a few datapoints, however, the paramount consideration is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures 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 nursing home the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a policy of turning a resident even once per day.

In addition, this nursing home also earned a virtually flawless government inspection. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with an impressive grade of A-. With this impressive grade, this place is one of the few facilities in Florida to receive straight A's. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection grades. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are quite insignificant. While this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.