Golden Livingcenter - Shafter

Although we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a grade of C for our long-term care rating. Long-term care grades focus on a facility's assistance with daily living instead of the skilled therapy or healthcare services that are critical to a skilled nursing facility. One of the datapoints we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccinations. Thankfully, this nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. This place also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Sadly, this nursing home's second highest category is short-term care. However, with a grade of D in this area, it still fared somewhat badly. Our short-term care scores are probably most meaningful for folks requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation usually requires additional skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not just nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Based on its grade in this area, we were not surprised to learn that this nursing home is well below average in terms of the quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. Honestly, this was what we expected to find. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents that returned home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.7 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

Sadly, this facility received a grade of just D in our inspection category. This is well below average grade. Inspection ratings weigh many items on the facility's inspection reports. If you see severe deficiencies on the reports, this is typically the worst sign. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to patient safety. This nursing home was assessed 7 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that suggest that they posed a risk to resident health or safety. Finally, we want to point out that this place received large government fines recently of more than $100,000. This often signifies that a bad track record has been an issue for several years.

Turning to our next category, this nursing home really did not perform well here either. Due to a rock bottom grade of F in nursing, this is really as terrible as it gets. Our nursing rating focuses on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We consider both the levels of licensure of those nurses and the number of hours spent with residents. This place offered just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This figure is quite a bit below average. Finally, we also looked at a few quality-based metrics in determining our nursing scores. This place was above average in two of the major areas we focus on, with good marks for minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. These metrics are generally reliable measures of the quality of nursing care offered.