Alameda Oaks Nursing Center

The primary reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it earned an elite inspection score. In fact, its inspection grade was far better than its overall score. In our inspections category, we gave this facility an A-. Inspection ratings account for a host of factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with better scores in this area tend to have few of these severe deficiencies. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Based on this, we had favorable view of this facility's recent inspections.

This nursing home's long-term care grade appears to be one of its higher scores. The nursing home was awarded a grade of C in this area. Our long-term care grades are based in part on the facility's quantity of nursing care. This includes a broad scope of personal care services, ranging from assistance with activities of daily living to routine medical services. On top of considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 98.3871 percent of its residents. Finally, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Sadly, this nursing home's third best score was short-term care. Nevertheless, with a grade of D in this category, it still performed relatively badly. Our short-term care grades are considered to be more meaningful for those requiring rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. This means not merely nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Given its poor grade in this category, we weren't shocked to discover this nursing home offered far fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most facilities. The last metric we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents that returned home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 4.8 percent of its patients returning home.

The next area we graded was nursing, ended up being this nursing home's least impressive category. We awarded this facility a grade of D in that category. When computing our nursing ratings, we analyze both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the skill levels of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. On top of ranking below average in nursing hours per resident, this nursing home also had poor marks in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing scores. We looked at the percentage of patients experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This place was at about 150 percent of the national average in both of these metrics. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These statistics pulled down this nursing home's nursing rating significantly.