Kaiser Permanente Post-Acute Care Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher grades in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing rating. This proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an A+. Our nursing rating consists of many datapoints, but the main one is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home provides 1.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Moving on our third category, we awarded this facility a grade of A for its short-term care score. This is a dominant score. In our short-term care category, we seek to forge a sound barometer for rehabilitation. In doing so, we assess a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. We were pleased to find that this nursing home employs both registered nurses and physical therapists. The same can't be said for all nursing homes. The last measure we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

Moving on to the next category, this nursing home also performed well in our long-term care category. We awarded it an A- in this category. This wrapped up truly elite report card. 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. After assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 84 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is slightly lower than we were hoping for but still a respectable percentage. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.