Humboldt Healthcare and Rehab Center

While this facility's overall grade was not bad, it really fared well in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A+ for that category, which is one of our best scores. Inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. We were not able to find deficiency counts for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Another one of this nursing home's better category scores was in the category of long-term care. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B+. When facilities receive a score in this range in this category it typically means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is much higher than the majority of nursing homes. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of C in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. When computing our nursing ratings, we weigh both staffing levels and the levels of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility fared better in some of the quality measures we assessed. It scored well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the quantity of hours of care offered.

The last area we scored was short-term care, which was this facility's weakest area. We gave this nursing home a D in that category. Naturally, this grade pulled down the facility's overall profile to some degree. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to assess a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to offer higher levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Unfortunately, we found that this facility offered fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most other nursing homes. The last datapoint we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 4 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics sunk this nursing home's short-term care grade.