Guadalupe Valley Nursing Center

While we were not complementary of this nursing home's overall performance, it actually received an impressive inspection report this year with few dings from the applicable government inspectors. As a result, it received one of our better grades in that area with a B. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. It is typically best to avoid nursing homes that have a long list of severe deficiencies. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This means 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. A couple minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

We also gave this facility a positive grade in long-term care. This nursing home received a grade of B in this area, which is one of our higher grades. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 99.74619 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Unfortunately, this nursing home only received a grade of D for its short-term care score, which is not a score to write home about. In computing these short-term care ratings, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our purpose is to devise a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Not surprisingly, we discovered that this facility provides significantly less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than a typical facility. The last statistic we considered in this area is the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 0 percent of its patients returning home.

The next category we analyzed is nursing, in which this facility was given a very poor score in this area as well. We gave it an F for this category, which is definitely a major disappointment. The nursing score is based on quite a few factors, but the most important one is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing ratings. This place performed well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good measures of the quality of nursing care.