Golden Livingcenter - London House Sonoma

While we did not give this nursing home a favorable overall grade, we actually gave it a strong grade in the category of short-term care, where it earned a B. In the area of short-term care, we strive to qualify measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. Unfortunately, we weren't able to track down information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The last measure we assessed in this category is the number of residents that returned home from the facility. We found that 6.1 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

We also ended up giving this facility a fairly respectable grade in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of B-. Nursing grades are primarily associated with the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics. Although this facility got docked a bit for nursing hours, it excelled in a few of these quality-based metrics. With fewer than five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it did remarkably well in this statistic. This can be an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of turning residents more frequently.

We gave this facility a grade of just D for our long-term care grade. This is not a score to write home about. For prospective patients seeking a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. One of the factors we considered on top of nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. Thankfully, this nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

The final category we looked at was inspections. This ended up being this facility's weakest link. We gave it a grade of just D in this area. Since this information is collected by independent government inspectors, we weight it heavily in our overall grade. Our inspection ratings account for several factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. This particular facility had 5 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only positive thing we found is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that suggest that they created a risk to patient safety or health. Finally, we also need to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home received significant government fines in recent years exceeding $50,000. This often suggests that CMS inspectors became frustrated after multiple years of failed inspections.