California Care Center

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with better grades in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Contributing to its top-shelf assessment, this facility also was given an excellent long-term care grade, with a grade of A-. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. After considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This facility is also strong in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of B+. It outperformed most nursing homes in this category. In calculating our nursing grades, we assess both staffing levels and the skill levels of the nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The fourth category we assessed is short-term care, where this facility was awarded a B+. This topped off a very favorable profile. Few nursing homes earned a B+ or higher in in each area we assessed. Short-term care grades are commonly used to judge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have better levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.