Brookdale Santa Catalina

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it earned an A+ in short-term care. This is simply as good as it gets in this area. In our short-term care score, we try to craft a fair barometer for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we analyze a facility's scope of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients that eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 6.7 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

Adding to its impressive profile, this nursing home also performed well in the area of inspections. In fact, it earned a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, it earned one of our best grades in that category with an A. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite insignificant. While this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

Turning to the category of nursing care, this facility didn't perform quite as well in this area as some of the categories discussed above. Nevertheless, a grade of B- in this category is by no means a bad score. Our nursing rating analyzes the facility's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of skill of those nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with patients. This place provides only 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a somewhat discouraging figure as it is well below the national average. Finally, despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this nursing home performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is generally an indicator that a facility has sufficient quality controls in place.

Switching gears to the last category, this facility received a decent long-term care rating. While this is not as dominant as several of its other grades, this is really not a bad grade. If you are looking for anything other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at long-term care scores. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients. This nursing home was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.