Cottonwood Health Care Center

Cottonwood Health Care Center is one of four available facilities located in Woodland, California. This is a fine nursing home. We awarded this it an overall grade of B+, which is very good score. In fact, we thought highly enough of this facility to rank it ahead of the majority of the facilities in Woodland. This place's strong report card was highlighted by its nursing score, which we will address in the next paragraph.

In addition to being a first rate nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received an A+. Few nursing homes fared better in this category. In computing a nursing home's nursing rating, we assess the amount of time nurses are seeing patients as well as the level of skill of the nurses. This nursing home provided 3.9 hours of nursing care per patient each day, which was above average. Lastly, this nursing home also excelled in the quality measures we assessed. For example, it fared as well as any facility the state in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these metrics as good indicators of the caliber of nursing care offered.

This nursing home also excelled in inspections. We awarded it an A- for that category. Inspection scores are tied to many datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This tells you CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

Turning to an additional strength for this nursing home, we awarded them one of our higher grades in our short-term care category as well, with a B+. In determining our short-term care scores, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The objective is to formulate a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. We were pleased to find that this nursing home employs both registered nurses and physical therapists. The same can't be said for all nursing homes. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who eventually returned home from this facility. We found that it fared better than most nursing homes in this area with 50.4 percent of its patients returning home.

The next category we assessed was long-term care. In this category, we gave this facility a solid grade of C. This actually was this nursing home's worst category. In the area of long-term care, we focus on the quantity of services provided by a nursing home, rather than more healthcare-oriented services. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 93.03797 percent of its residents. This is somewhat below what we anticipated but still a reasonably acceptable figure. Nevertheless, this facility was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.