Brookdale Carmel Valley

In addition to being a quality nursing home overall, this facility excelled in our short-term care rating, where it earned an A-. Short-term care grades are generally employed to grade a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. We were pleased to find that this nursing home employs both registered nurses and physical therapists. The same can't be said for all nursing homes. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents that who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. We found that 5.3 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

Among this facility's other strengths is its elite nursing grade. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of A-. Nursing scores are largely tied to the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 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 facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of moving a resident more often.

Adding yet another impressive category grade, we awarded this facility an impressive grade of A- for our inspections category. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This place was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This indicates that the inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies an imminent risk to patient health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

The final area we analyzed is long-term care, in which this facility was awarded a grade of B-. While this proved to be its poorest category grade, this is still not a bad grade. Our long-term care grade is used to assess a facility's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing on the skilled nursing services offered by a rehabilitation facility. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate this place's vaccination data. Finally, this place excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.