French Park Care Center

French Park Care Center is one of eight nursing homes located in Santa Ana, California. With an overall rating of F, we consider this to be a lower end nursing home. Santa Ana received a city grade of B-, so there are other options in the city worth considering. We would not blame you if you're ready to stop reading and find another facility. However, if you want to learn more about this place's category grades, we will discuss nursing in the next paragraph.

Although we graded this nursing home extremely poorly overall, it received a somewhat respectable nursing score this year. We gave it a grade of B- in that category. There are numerous subcategories included in this grade. Many of these datapoints reflect the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. According to CMS records, this place averaged 5.1 hours of nursing care per patient per day. Keep in mind that when we calculate our nursing grades, we apply more weight to hours performed by nurses with a higher level of training. Although this nursing home excelled in terms of quantity of nursing hours, it fell short in some of the metrics that related to quality. This place's nursing rating was pulled down by its weak performance in the area of minimizing pressure ulcers. In fact, we found that 12.7 percent of this nursing home's patients were suffering from pressure ulcers.

Incredibly, we gave this facility a B- for its long-term care score, which is not a bad grade. In the category of long-term care, we look at the amount of services provided by a facility, rather than more sophisticated services. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. The last datapoint we looked at was the nursing home's hospitalization rate. We found that this facility had 4.85 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. While this figure is somewhat concerning, this number may be skewed for some facilities based on the preexisting medical conditions of patients.

Turning to the area of short-term care, this facility received just a D in this category. Short-term care grades are often used to assess a facility's performance with rehabilitation In order to have high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. Not surprisingly, we found that this facility offers significantly less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than the typical nursing home. The last datapoint we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 41.4 percent of its residents returning home.

Turning the final category of inspections, this nursing home really did not fare well. It received an F in our inspection category. This is the most heavily weighted category in our overall scoring system. We would advise paying special attention to any deficiencies on a facility's inspection reports when it receives this poor of an inspection rating. We recommend you pay close attention to the level of severity of the deficiencies. This particular facility was hit with 7 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that indicate that they caused a threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility also received 23 substantiated complaints in recent years. This is yet another bad sign.