Boulder Creek Post Acute

We wanted to point out that this place's long-term care rating outpaced its overall score. We awarded it a B+ for its long-term care grade, which is one of our higher scores. This really boosted its overall grade. Nursing homes that receive this type of grade in this category tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to ensure residents are well cared for. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly can be a life threatening ailment for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home does not take any chances. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home also received a strong nursing grade. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B in that category, which is one of our better scores. We assessed the skill-level of nurses employed by the facility, as well as the quantity of hours the nurses were with residents, in calculating our score in this category. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility California in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a system of turning a patient more frequently.

This facility earned a solid inspection report this year as well, with few dings from the applicable government inspectors. As a result, it earned one of our better grades in that category with a score of B-. Our inspection ratings are tied to many datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important item to look for on these inspections. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to patient safety. Although this place had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

The last area we analyzed is short-term care, which proved to be a weak spot for this nursing home. We awarded this nursing home a D in our short-term care category. With our short-term care assessment, we try to craft a meaningful barometer for rehabilitation. In this process, we assess a nursing home's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The last metric we assessed in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 3.8 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics doomed this nursing home's short-term care grade.