Kern River Transitional Care

While this facility's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually didn't perform terribly in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a B- for that category, which is one of our better scores. We would argue that one of the most important factors in assessing an inspection report is deficiencies. In this regard, we especially focus on the severity of the deficiencies. While this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This tells you that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

Sadly, this facility's second highest category was long-term care. As it turns out, with a grade of D in this category, it still fared somewhat badly. If you are looking for services other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care grades. Once we assessed the volume of nursing care, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. We were pleased to learn that this nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Surprisingly, this place was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.

The third area we analyzed is short-term care, in which this facility was given an F. Our short-term care scores are vital for residents needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a vast scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Considering its score in this category, we were not stunned to find that this place is well below average in terms of the number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the data we assessed. Frankly, this was about what we expected to find. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely wasn't a strength for this facility. We found that just 4.5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, about half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.

The final category we rated is nursing. We gave it an abysmal F in this area, which is a bottom of the barrel score. Our nursing rating is mostly associated with the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. With just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient daily, this place's nurse staffing levels were quite a bit below average. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing ratings. This facility fared well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these data points to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care.