Almaden Health and Rehabilitation Center

Almaden Health and Rehabilitation Center is located in the densely populated metropolitan area of San Jose, California. This is a quality facility, with an overall grade of B+. We were pleased to find out that this matched the average grade of facilities in San Jose, which is one of the better cities in California to find a nursing home. We were also pleased to find that this nursing home didn't have any weak links in any of the major categories discussed below. More information about these categories can be found below.

To pair with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. In the category of short-term care, we attempt to evaluate indicators of a facility's rehabilitation services. We assess a facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. One reason for this facility's strong score in this category is that it provides a substantially greater volume of physical therapist hours to its residents than the average nursing home. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who eventually returned home from this facility. On top of excelling in the area of physical therapy hours, we found that it performed as well as just about any nursing home in the nation with 64 percent of its residents returning home.

Adding to its impressive category grades, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Inspection ratings are tied to many items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this area have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

In addition, this facility also received favorable nursing grades this year. In fact, we awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. Our nursing score analyzes the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of skill of those nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 3.9 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is higher than the level of care offered by most nursing homes. Lastly, this facility also performed well in several of the quality-based metrics we assessed. By way of illustration, in terms of the number of its patients suffering falls which lead to serious injury, this nursing home performed better than the national average. This is often a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The last category we graded was long-term care. This nursing home was awarded a better than average long-term care score this year, with a grade of C. While this wasn't as dominant as many of its other grades, this remains a decent rating for this area. Long-term care grades are used to judge a nursing home's performance as a traditional convalescent home, as opposed to focusing on the skilled nursing services offered by a skilled nursing facility. In addition to offering above average levels of nursing care and other staffing, this nursing home gave the pneumonia vaccine to 98.67841 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Although it had 1.86 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, its risk adjusted statistic was better than most nursing homes due to it having more complex patients.