Heritage Oaks West Retirement Village

The primary reason this nursing home received a decent overall score is its impeccable health inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with an A. This is a much better score than the facility's overall score, which was decent but certainly not elite. Our inspection ratings are based on items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this area have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This facility was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to create an imminent risk to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also want to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home was awarded a great long-term care grade. In fact, we awarded it one of our highest scores in this area with a grade of A-. Facilities that do well in long-term care typically provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 94.57365 percent of its residents, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is too frequently a dangerous illness for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a nursing home does not roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

We also gave this nursing home a respectable grade in the area of short-term care, where we gave it a C. Short-term care scores are crucial for people needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically mandates more highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes a vast scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. It doesn't appear that this facility provided registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. The final measure we assessed in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 5.5 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is actually below average.

Switching gears to the next category, this nursing home really did not fare very well. Due to an abysmal grade of F in nursing, this is this nursing home's poorest area. There are many criteria within this area. Most of these factors reflect nurse staffing. This place offered a meager 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This figure is significantly below average. In addition to its below average nursing hour totals, this facility received poor marks in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing grades. We found that more of this place's residents experienced falls which led to major injury.