Golden Palms Retirement & Health Center

The main reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it earned an excellent inspection score. In fact, its inspection score was far better than its overall grade. In the inspections category, we gave this facility an A+. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this category typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This tells you the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

Another one of this nursing home's more favorable category grades came in the area of short-term care. In that area, we gave this nursing home a grade of B+. It actually outperformed most nursing homes in this category. In our short-term care category, we endeavor to craft a meaningful barometer for rehabilitation services. In this process, we look at the nursing home's offerings of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. We were extremely impressed to find that this facility offers its residents substantially more physical therapist hours than most other nursing homes. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of nursing homes in the country with 73.9 percent of its residents returning home. This is a significantly higher rate than most nursing homes.

The third category we looked at was long-term care, where this facility received a C in this category. In computing our long-term care grades, we analyze the facility's personal care services. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 86.666664 percent of its patients. This is many points less than what we expected. On a more positive note, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The last category we graded is nursing. We awarded it a grade of C in this area. This is a perfectly acceptable grade in this area. Nursing grades are mostly associated with a nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 3.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, our nursing scores also factor in quality-based measures, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this facility performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is usually an indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place. Many falls could be avoided if a facility supplies enough nurses aids to assist its patients.