Antelope Valley Care Center

Although this nursing home's overall grade is not a highlight, it received a slightly more favorable grade in the area of inspections. We awarded it a grade of B- for this category, which is not bad. Inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. We would not recommend this facility under any circumstance.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. Nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this nursing home an B-. We looked at the licensure of nurses employed by the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of time the nurses spent with patients, in determining our score in this category. This place averages just 0.5 hours of nursing care per patient each day, which is well below average. Finally, nursing grades also factor in quality-based measures, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this facility performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is often an indicator that a facility has quality controls in place. Many falls can be avoided if a nursing home supplies enough nurses to assist its patients.

The third area we graded was short-term care, where this facility received a B- in this category. Our short-term care ratings are critical for patients seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a wide scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other types of therapy. We found that this facility was below average in the two key staffing areas we focus on. In fact, it supplied fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The last measure we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents that were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 5.4 percent of this facility's residents returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.

The final category we graded was long-term care. We awarded it a grade of B- in this area. This is a perfectly acceptable grade in this category. With our long-term care grade, we assess the sheer quantity of care provided by a facility, as well as a handful of qualitative data points. After we finished looking at the amount of nursing care, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination data. We were optimistic to learn that this nursing home vaccinates 99.73475 percent of its residents against pneumonia. This facility 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 a remarkably low figure.