Ararat Convalescent Hospital

To go along with its strong overall score, we gave this facility an A for short-term care. Our short-term care scores are critical for individuals requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires additional highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a vast range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final measure we assessed in this category is the number of patients that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A. Nursing ratings are mostly associated with the nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home California in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by having a system of turning a resident more often.

Tallying yet another strong category grade, this nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A-. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some are relatively insignificant. This place was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies an immediate threat to resident safety or health. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

Switching gears to our next area, this facility also performed admirably in the long-term care category. We awarded it an A- for that area. This completed a straight A report card. Facilities that receive this kind of score in this category tend to provide consistent around the clock care to ensure patients are kept in good health. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is often a life threatening condition for nursing home residents so we like it when a facility does not leave this to chance. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.