Boulder Creek Post Acute

Although we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a grade of B- for our long-term care rating. Our long-term care grade assesses a facility's personal care instead of the skilled nursing and healthcare services that are critical to a skilled nursing facility. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. We were pleased to find that this facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Finally, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Interestingly, this nursing home's abysmal overall score can't really be attributed to its government inspection reports. We awarded it a grade of C for inspections. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively insignificant. This place was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were in categories G through L. This tells you the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies to create an imminent danger to patient safety or health. Finally, they also received 16 substantiated complaints in recent years. This is certainly not a great sign.

Remarkably, we awarded this nursing home a grade of C for our nursing rating, which isn't a bad grade. In computing our nursing scores, we look at both nursing hours and the training levels of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics. While this facility got docked a bit for nursing hours, it excelled in a few of these quality-based metrics. With fewer than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it fared well in this subcategory. This is typically a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a system of turning a patient even once per day.

The final category we looked at was short-term care. This nursing home was given a very poor grade of F in that area. Our short-term care scores are presumably more meaningful for patients in need of a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not merely nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. With its score in this category, we weren't surprised to discover that this nursing home is well below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the metrics we looked at. Frankly, this was what we expected to find. The last statistic we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.4 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics was damning for this nursing home's short-term care score.