Golden Living Center - Galt

The main reason this facility received a decent overall score is its excellent government inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our better scores in that area, with an A-. This is a much better score than the place's overall score, which was decent but not in the elite range. Arguably the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this area typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This nursing home received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to pose an immediate risk to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

This nursing home also was given a positive grade in our long-term care category. We gave this nursing home a better than average grade of B in this area. Nursing homes that do well in this category typically provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 98.78049 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly can be a life threatening health condition for nursing home residents so we like it when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facilities third best area is short-term care. We awarded it a C in this category. This is basically a middle of the pack score in this area. In the area of short-term care, we attempt to evaluate measures of a facility's rehabilitation services. We look at a nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. Unfortunately, we found that this facility provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The tricky part is determining what effect this had on quality of care. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

The next area we graded was nursing, which is this nursing home's worst category. We gave this facility a D in this area. Our nursing score analyzes the facility's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of training of those nurses as well as the amount of time spent with patients. This place provided a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This number is quite a bit below the national average. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing scores. This facility performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these statistics to be good measures of the quality of nursing care.