Healthcare Centre of Fresno

The main reason this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an elite nursing grade. In fact, we gave this facility a grade of A-. Our nursing score is based on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of licensure of the nurses as well as the amount of time spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of moving residents more often.

This facility also received favorable government inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our better scores in that category, with a grade of B. This is better than its overall grade. Inspection grades are tied to items found on the a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this category have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. A few minor deficiencies aren't necessarily something to panic about.

Additionally, we also would like to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home received favorable long-term care marks in this assessment. We awarded them one of our more impressive scores in this area, with a B. Nursing homes that receive this kind of grade in this category tend to provide consistent around the clock care to ensure patients are well cared for. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly is often a deadly health condition for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Turning to our fourth area, this facility received a C for short-term care, which we consider to be a respectable grade. In calculating our short-term care grades, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our objective is to devise a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who who were able to eventually return home from this facility. We found that 2.7 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit below average.