Carlsbad by the Sea

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. Our nursing grade is based on many components, many of which are associated with nursing hours. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed 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 nursing home the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of turning a patient more frequently.

This facility has also received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively minor. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate deficiency counts for this nursing home. We would like to have more information about this facility. Without deficiency related data, it ended up being difficult to really grade this nursing home in this category.

The next category we analyzed was short-term care. This nursing home also was awarded an A+ short-term care grade, rendering it one of the few nursing homes to be given multiple A+ category grades. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to measure a facility's performance with rehabilitation In order to have good rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final statistic we assessed in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 6.2 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

Turning to the last area, this nursing home was given an extremely favorable long-term care rating. We gave it a grade of B+ in that area, topping off one of our finer profiles. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is far higher than the average nursing home. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.