Casa Coloma Health Care Center

While this facility's overall grade was not a highlight, it did receive a very good grade in the area of inspections. We awarded it a B for that area, which is one of our better scores. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some end up being quite insignificant. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. A couple minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

One of this nursing home's better category grades came in the category of long-term care. This ended up being its second most respectable category. In that category, we gave this facility a grade of C. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is better than most nursing homes. Finally, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home actually received a decent grade in the area of nursing as well. We awarded it a grade of C for that category, which is not a bad score. In computing a nursing home's nursing grade, we weigh the number of hours nurses are with residents as well as the skill levels of the nurses. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Lastly, we also looked at several nursing quality measures. Although this nursing home got dinged a bit for nursing hours, it excelled in some of these quality measures. With less than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it performed very well in this statistic. This is typically an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a policy of turning a resident at least once a day.

The last category we looked at is short-term care. This nursing home was given a bottom of the barrel grade of F in that area. Our short-term care grade is generally used to score a facility's rehabilitation services. To offer highly scored rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to offer higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. Based on its score in this category, we weren't stunned to learn that this nursing home was well below average in terms of the number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its residents based on the metrics we looked at. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 4.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.