Bay Area Healthcare Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this place had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Nursing scores are largely associated with a facility's nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this place 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 typically be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of moving patients more often.

Additionally, this facility also was given favorable long-term care scores this year. Indeed, we awarded it one of our higher grades in that area, with a score of B+. Facilities that do well in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients, which is much higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In the last category we graded, this nursing home was awarded a very strong grade of B+ in our short-term care category. With this score, the facility completed a very impressive profile. Our short-term care scores are probably most critical for individuals in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing. This includes not merely nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number of residents that returned home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.