Advanced Health Care of Sacramento

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home also received an A+ short-term care grade. In calculating our short-term care scores, we size up a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This area is typically a fair measure of the nursing home's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last datapoint we considered in this category is the number of residents who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that 7.1 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

This facility has also received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Inspection ratings account for several factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we consider is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with better grades in this category generally have few severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A in our nursing category. There are quite a few datapoints included in this area. Most of the criteria reflect staffing levels. This facility provided 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed 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 facility the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a system of turning a patient more frequently.

The last category we graded was long-term care. In that category, we gave this facility a strong grade of B. If you are looking for services other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at long-term care grades. One of the data points we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccines. It doesn't appear that this nursing home provided information on its vaccination levels. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.