Cottonwood Canyon Healthcare Center

Cottonwood Canyon Healthcare Center is an average-sized nursing home located in El Cajon, California. This is a good facility with a B overall. This was right in line with the city grade in El Cajon. Even in a city featuring 12 other nursing homes, this nursing home turns out to be a sound selection. We also gave this facility strong grades in all of the major categories. More information about these categories can be found below.

On top of earning a strong overall grade, this nursing home fared even better in the area of inspections which is based on the nursing home's recent inspections. We gave it a grade of A- for this category, which is one of our highest grades. Inspection grades account for several factors found on a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area usually have few severe deficiencies. While this place had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

Contributing to its profile, this nursing home also earned a score of B+ for its short-term care rating. This is an above average grade in this category. In determining our short-term care ratings, we analyze the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This area is typically a fair measure of a facility's rehabilitation services. Remarkably, this facility provides its residents with at least 50% more physical therapist hours per week than the average facility. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of nursing homes in the nation in this area with 56.5 percent of its patients returning home.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B. The nursing rating weighs many factors, most of which are tied to nursing hours. This facility provided 3.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at a few quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place excelled in these areas, with excellent scores for minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. These areas are generally reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care a nursing home provides.

Moving on to our fourth area, this facility received a highly favorable long-term care rating. This facility did not prove to have any weaknesses. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in long-term care it is typically a good sign for patient care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 97.87234 percent of its patients, which is much higher than most nursing homes. The last statistic we assessed is the nursing home's hospitalization rate. We found that this nursing home had 3.15 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Although this wasn't as favorable as most of its other scores in this area, this number may be skewed for some facilities based on some of the medical complexity of patients.