Carmel Hills Care Center

Carmel Hills Care Center is an average-sized nursing home in Monterey, California. This turns out to be an A rated facility, which is one of the top ratings that we offer. In fact, we were so impressed with this facility that we rated it ahead of the majority of the nursing homes in Monterey, which has a strong selection of facilities. We also gave this facility impressive ratings in each of the major categories. More information about these categories can be found below.

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A. There are a host of subcategories included in this grade. Many of the subcategories reflect the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This nursing home provided 4 hours of nursing care per resident daily. Roughly a quarter of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. Both of these statistics beat out the national average. Lastly, this place also excelled in several of the quality measures we assessed. With less than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility California in this category.

This facility also excelled in the category of short-term care, where we awarded it a grade of A. Not many facilities fared better in this area. Our short-term care ratings are thought to be more critical for patients needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation usually requires additional highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. One of this facility's strengths is that it provides more than seven hours of care per week from registered nurses to each resident. This is the gold standard for this metric, as it's roughly 50% higher than a typical place's level of registered nurse staffing. The final statistic we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that it performed as well as just about any nursing home in California in this area with 56.9 percent of its patients returning home. With most facilities, fewer than half of their short-term residents return home.

This nursing home also received a nearly flawless government inspection report. It received one of our highest grades in that category with an A-. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are quite minor. Although this place had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

The fourth area we assessed is long-term care, where this facility was awarded a grade of B+. This topped off a first-rate report card. Only a select few nursing homes received a B+ or better in in each area we assessed. When nursing homes receive this kind of grade in long-term care it is a good sign for resident care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses aids. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 99.27798 percent of its residents, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia can be a life or death condition for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility does not take any chances. The last statistic we assessed was the nursing home's hospitalization rate. We found that this nursing home had 1.97 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is middle of the road in this area.