Alameda Care Center

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this facility also excelled in the category of inspections, where it received an A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. Arguably the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This facility was hit with 7 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe. This tells you that the inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

This facilities next most favorable area is long-term care. We gave it a B- in this category. This is basically a middle of the road score in this category. In calculating our long-term care scores, we assess the personal care offered to a nursing home's patients. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is more than the majority of nursing homes. This place was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B-. Our nursing grade looks at the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of licensure of the nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, nursing grades also consider quality-based measures, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this nursing home actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is usually a reliable indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place. Some falls can be avoided if a facility provides enough nurses to assist its residents.

Turning to the final area, this nursing home was awarded an acceptable short-term care score of C. Our short-term care ratings are thought to be most critical for those in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation typically utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not just nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its level of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the metrics we assessed. The final measure we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 3.5 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. This figure was below the national average.