Alta Gardens Care Center

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this facility also earned first-rate health inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our better grades in that area, with an A. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This place received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This indicates that the inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies to be an immediate risk to resident health or safety. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so favorably is that it was given a very impressive long-term care score. In fact, long-term care is its second best category grade. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A-. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 99.723755 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is far higher than the majority of 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 less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home received a favorable short-term care score as well. We gave it one of our higher scores in that area with a score of B+. In determining these short-term care grades, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to devise a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Unfortunately, it does not look like this nursing home provided information about its staffing of registered nurses or physical therapists. The last statistic we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that 5.4 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

Switching gears to our fourth category, this facility was awarded a decent nursing rating. Even though this was not as good as a few of its other scores, this is really a middle of the pack score. The nursing grade weighs a variety of factors. The most heavily weighted variable is the amount of time nurses spend with residents. This place provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a relatively low total compared with most other nursing homes. Lastly, our nursing ratings also factor in some quality-focused measures. We especially like to look at the percent of residents who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. Sometimes these statistics are indicators of the quality of nursing care, since superior care tends to reduce these issues.