El Encanto Healthcare Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. Nursing ratings are primarily based on a facility's nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Adding to its strong profile, this nursing home also was given an excellent short-term care score, with a grade of A-. Our short-term care grade is typically used to score a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To offer high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last metric we considered in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

In addition, this facility also excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned a grade of B+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively minor. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you the government inspectors did not 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 inspections are rare in the industry.

The next category we graded is long-term care, in which this nursing home was awarded a grade of B-. This actually proved to be this nursing home's worst area. This is still nothing to be ashamed of. Long-term care grades are based on a facility's volume of care. This includes a broad spectrum of personal care services, ranging from help with activities of daily living to routine medical services. One of the factors we considered after nurse's aid hours is vaccines. Thankfully, this facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. This facility also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.