Golden Empire Nursing & Rehab Center

On top of receiving a great overall score, this place also received top notch health inspections in recent years. We gave it one of our best grades in that category, with an A. Inspection grades are tied to many datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this area have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This tells you the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

This nursing home is also above average in the category of short-term care, where it was awarded a score of B+. It performed better than most facilities in this category. Our short-term care grades are based on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a broad spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. It doesn't appear that this facility submitted information on registered nurse or physical therapist staffing. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.2 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Turning to our third area, this nursing home also received a grade of B+ for its long-term care rating. This is an above average grade in this area. Facilities that excel in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is often a life threatening condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home does not leave its residents vulnerable. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The final category we scored is nursing, where we gave it a strong grade of B. This facility really didn't have any weak links. Our nursing rating assesses the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of licensure of the nurses and the quantity of hours spent with residents. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place California in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a system of turning a patient more frequently.