Greenfield Care Center of Fullerton

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. The nursing grade assesses several components, however, the main one is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of moving a resident more frequently.

We also wanted to alert you to the fact that this facility received a top-shelf score of A in our long-term care category. Facilities that receive this type of score in long-term care tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure patients are well cared for. One of the criteria we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccines. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. This is a proven method to minimize unnecessary deaths for the nursing home population. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home has had near flawless government inspections in recent years. We gave them an A in this category. Inspection grades are tied to several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this category tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In the last category we scored, this facility received a very favorable grade of A in our short-term care category. With this score, the facility topped off a straight A report card. In calculating our short-term care scores, we analyze the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This area is more often than not a solid assessment of a facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 5.6 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.