Delano Postacute Care

We would like to point out that this facility's nursing rating exceeded its overall grade. This facility earned a grade of B+ in this category, which is one of our better grades. The nursing grade features numerous factors. The most important variable is the quantity of hours nurses spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Inspections is another area where this facility excelled. In fact, we gave this facility a grade of B+ for our inspections category. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones 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. A couple minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

The third category we analyzed was short-term care. In that area, we gave this nursing home a C. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to score a nursing home's rehabilitation services In order to provide good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to offer higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. We were surprised to find that this nursing home was below average in the two key staffing areas we assessed. It supplied fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. It is still important to determine whether this also correlates to a lower quality of care. The final item we considered in this area is the number of patients that were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 4.7 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The final category we analyzed is long-term care, which was a weak link for this facility. We gave this nursing home a grade of D for our long-term care category. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 96.42857 percent of its patients, which is better than most nursing homes. Surprisingly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Sadly, a few of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.