Bay Area Healthcare Center

To pair with its favorable overall grade, we gave this facility an A+ for our inspections rating. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection scores. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being quite minor. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. A couple relatively minor deficiencies are not something to panic about.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A-. Nursing grades are mostly associated with a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics 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 the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a system of moving residents even once per day.

The next area we assessed was long-term care. This facility was awarded a favorable long-term care score, with a B+ in this area. Nursing homes that receive this type of score in this category tend to provide consistent around the clock care to ensure residents are kept in good health. One of the statistics we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccines. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. This is a great way to minimize negative health outcomes for the aged 65 and up population. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Turning to the last area, this facility was given an excellent short-term care score. Although this is not nearly as impressive as several of its other grades, this remains one of our stronger grades we offer. Short-term care grades are typically used to grade a facility's rehabilitation services. To offer quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.