Fallbrook Skilled Nursing

One of the reasons this ended up being a quality facility is that it received an impressive inspection rating. In fact, inspections is its best category. In that area, we gave it an A+. Our inspection ratings are tied to many datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this area typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

Another strong feature for this nursing home is that it was given a very positive long-term care score. In fact, this ended up being its second best category grade. In this category, we awarded this nursing home a B+. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. One of the statistics we considered after nursing hours was vaccines. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. This is a proven method to minimize unnecessary hospitalizations for the nursing home population. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home's next most favorable category is short-term care. We gave it a B- in this category. This is basically a middle of the road score in this area. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to gauge a facility's rehabilitation services To have high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide better levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. It does not look like this facility submitted registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. The last measure we considered in this category is the percentage of patients that ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that just 5.3 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The final category we rated is nursing. We gave it a grade of B- in this category. This is not a bad grade in this area. There are many factors included in this area. Many of these subcategories relate to levels of nurse staffing. This place provides only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a somewhat discouraging figure as it is well below the national average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home surprisingly fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. In fact, it performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.