Brookdale Palmer Ranch

To pair with its strong overall score, we awarded this facility an A+ for its short-term care score. In calculating these short-term care ratings, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The objective is to devise a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last item we assessed in this category is the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 7.2 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

This nursing home has received near flawless government inspections recently. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are quite insignificant. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Turning our next area, we gave this nursing home a grade of A- for its long-term care grade. This is a dominant score. When facilities receive this kind of score in long-term care it is a good sign for patient care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. After looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this place 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 a remarkably low figure.

In our final area, we awarded this nursing home a A for our nursing grade. This completed an elite report card. The nursing score includes a number of data points. The most heavily weighted variable is the amount of time nurses spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures 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 the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a policy of turning a resident at least once a day.