Del Mar Convalescent Hospital

While this nursing home's overall grade was decent, it really excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our best scores. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This nursing home was hit with 10 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe. This means that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to pose an immediate threat to patient health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

Another one of this nursing home's stronger areas was in the category of nursing care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of B. Nursing scores are mostly associated with the nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a policy of moving a patient more frequently.

This nursing home's next best area was short-term care. We awarded it a grade of C in this category. This is essentially a middle of the pack grade in this category. Our short-term care grade is often used to judge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation To offer high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally must provide better levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final statistic we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that just 3.8 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is actually below average.

The next area we assessed is long-term care, which was this nursing home's weakest area. We awarded this facility a D in this category. Of course, this category hurt the nursing home's overall grade to a certain degree. If you are seeking services other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care grades. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.