Folsom Care Center

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home received an A+ for nursing. Our nursing grade looks at the facility's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of skill of those nurses and the amount of time spent with residents. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This top notch nursing home also excelled in the area of long-term care, where it received a score of A+. Only a small group of facilities fared better in this area. Facilities that excel in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. After looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is far higher than most nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The next category we looked at was inspections, where this facility also received an A+ grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. 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. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In the final category, this facility was given another A+ for its short-term care grade, finishing off an amazing profile of A+'s in all four categories. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to measure a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To have good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must offer higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of patients that ultimately returned home from this nursing home. We found that 6.7 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.