Chowchilla Memorial Healthcare District

We gave this facility one of our better scores in long-term care, with a grade of A+. This is a notably better grade than the nursing home's overall grade, which was decent but not elite. Facilities that excel in long-term care tend to provide patients with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. Once we concluded our assessment of the quantity of nursing care, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia can be a dangerous condition for nursing home residents so we like it when a facility doesn't take any chances. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. In that category, we awarded this facility a grade of B+. The nursing grade considers numerous subcategories. The most important factor is the number of hours nurses spend with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The third best category we gave this nursing home in any area came in the category of short-term care, where we awarded it a B-. With our short-term care category, we strive to create a sound gauge for rehabilitation. In this process, we assess a nursing home's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this nursing home provided information on registered nurse or physical therapist staffing. The last item we looked at in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is below average.

In the last category of inspections, we gave this facility a grade of just D for our inspection category. This proved to be its worst category grade, particularly in light of some of the more impressive grades referenced above. Nevertheless, since this data is compiled by an independent government inspector, we weight it heavily in our assessment. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection scores. One key factor is health deficiencies. We would scrutinize the level of severity of those deficiencies. This nursing home was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only positive thing we can say is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that suggest they created a threat to resident health or safety. Lastly, this facility has received significant government fines in recent years.