El Rancho Vista Health Care Center

This nursing home's overall grade was helped by a strong long-term care score. We gave them one of our higher scores in that area, with a grade of B. This is a much better grade than its overall score. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. Once we finished looking at the volume of nursing care, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is often a life or death condition for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it 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 an impressively low figure.

This nursing home's second best category is inspections. In that category, we gave this facility a B. Inspection grades are tied to pieces of information located in the a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This place was assessed 10 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe. This indicates that the government inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to cause an immediate threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

Another strength of this facility is its favorable grade in nursing. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a score of D. Our nursing grade is primarily tied to a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home offered just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing ratings. This nursing home fared well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be measures of the quality of nursing care.

Moving on to our next area, we gave this nursing home a D for the area of short-term care. This is the facility's worst category rating. Our short-term care grades are critical for patients seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically mandates additional highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes a broad spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. With a grade this poor in this category, we weren't stunned to learn this place was well below average in many staffing areas we looked at. It supplied far fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most nursing homes. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that just 4.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.