Golden Hill Post Acute Care

While this facility's overall grade was not bad, it really fared well in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our best scores. Our inspection ratings are tied to many datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

This nursing home's second most favorable area came in the area of short-term care. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a B-. In determining our short-term care ratings, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our objective is to create a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final metric we considered in this category is the percentage of patients that returned home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below average.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. We looked at the licensure of nurses working for the nursing home, in addition to the number of hours those nurses were with patients, in calculating our rating in this category. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a much lower figure than we were hoping for. Finally, despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this nursing home actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is generally an indicator that a nursing home has sufficient quality controls in place.

The last category we graded was long-term care. We awarded this nursing home a grade of C in this area. In computing these long-term care ratings, we assess the nursing home's personal care services. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Fortunately, this nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is an above average total. This facility keeps its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.06 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.