Kern Valley Healthcare District Distinct Part Skilled Nursing Facility

With an address in Lake Isabella, California, Kern Valley Healthcare District Distinct Part Skilled Nursing Facility is the sole nursing home we were able to find in the city. This facility was given an F, which is just about as bad as it gets in our grading scheme. Based on our assessment, you'd be better off to avoid of this nursing home. Surprisingly, we were able to give this nursing home some positive feedback for our inspections category, which you can read more about below.

Although we graded this place incredibly poorly overall, it actually received a relatively impressive inspection report this year. As a result, it earned one of our better grades in that area with a B+. Inspection scores account for a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we rely on is the number and severity of deficiencies. You generally want to avoid facilities with too many severe deficiencies flagged. This nursing home was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of these deficiencies to cause an immediate risk to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of D. There are a number of criteria within this area. Many of these factors are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 3.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day, which is below the national average. Unfortunately, this nursing home also had abysmal scores in several of the quality-based metrics to pair with its weak nursing hour totals. For starters, we looked at the percentage of patients sustaining pressure ulcers. This nursing home was at more than double the national average in this statistic. This is alarming when you consider that many pressure ulcers are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the facility's fate of earning a poor nursing rating.

Sadly, this facility only earned a D for its short-term care rating, which is not a score to write home about. Our short-term care scores are based in part on the facility's quantity of skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This includes a broad spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The last area we looked at is long-term care, where this facility received a very poor grade in this category also. It received a lowly F for this category, which is obviously a major concern. In a long-term care environment, the primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Fortunately, this nursing home provided the vaccine to 96.38009 percent of its residents, which is a very solid total. Surprisingly, this facility also wasn't as bad as we expected at keeping its residents out of the hospital. While it had 1.98 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, its risk adjusted metric was not bad since it had more complicated patients.