Golden Palms Retirement & Health Center

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Inspection grades are tied to several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this area typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This tells you that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In addition, this facility also was given favorable long-term care scores in our assessment. In fact, we gave it one of our higher scores in that area, with a grade of B+. For patients seeking a permanent place to live rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are a key measure. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 87.87879 percent of its residents. This is somewhat less than we were hoping for but still a decent percentage. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility was given a favorable short-term care score as well. We gave it one of our better grades in that area with a score of B+. In our short-term care category, we endeavor to craft a meaningful measure for rehabilitation services. In this process, we look at a facility's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. We were not able to track down information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.9 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

The last category we graded was nursing, which was a weak spot for this facility. We gave this nursing home a D for the area of nursing, making this its worst category. We'd nevertheless suggest that you look at the bigger picture. There are a variety of factors included in this category. Most of these factors relate to nurse staffing. This nursing home offered only 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient each day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing ratings. This facility fared well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these data points to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care.