San Joaquin Nursing and Rehabilitation

Even though this nursing home's overall score was abysmal, it actually didn't perform terribly in the area of short-term care. In fact, we gave it a B- for that category, which isn't bad. However, this wasn't enough to spare its overall profile. Short-term care grades are generally employed to gauge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The hope is always that this does not adversely affect the quality of care. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was actually quite a bit below the national average.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. In that category, we gave this nursing home an D. Nursing ratings are based largely on levels of nurse staffing. This facility averaged a meager 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient each day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing ratings. This place performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these metrics to be measures of the quality of nursing care.

This nursing home's second worse category was long-term care, where it received just a D in that category. This is a well below average score. For residents seeking a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. Once we concluded our assessment of the amount of care provided by nurses, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination statistics. We were pleased to learn that this facility vaccinates 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia. To our surprise, this facility also keeps its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.

Unfortunately, this facility did not receive a favorable inspection rating. We gave it a grade of just just D in this category. Inspection grades relate to a nursing home's government inspections. We weight poor inspection scores heavily in our assessment. Since the inspection reports are completed by independent government inspectors, we consider this data to be reliable. Inspection ratings factor in many items found on the facility's recent inspection reports. When you see severe deficiencies on the reports, this is generally the worst sign. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to resident safety. This nursing home had 6 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only positive thing we can say is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that suggest they posed a risk to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility also received 57 substantiated complaints in recent years. This is yet another bad sign.