Kern Valley Healthcare District Skilled Nursing Facility

While we did not rate this facility well overall, we would like to point out its decent government inspection reports in recent years. We awarded it a relatively respectable score of B- in that category. Inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Lastly, this facility was flagged by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. We prefer to avoid facilities with this designation. Please do your best to find an alternative nursing home.

This nursing home actually received a decent grade in the area of nursing as well. We awarded it a grade of B- for that category, which is not a bad score. Nursing ratings are mostly associated with a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Finally, our nursing grades also consider quality-based metrics, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this facility actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is often a reliable indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place. Many falls could be avoided if a facility supplies enough nurses aids to assist its patients.

The next most favorable area we awarded this facility in any category came in the area of short-term care, where we awarded it a grade of B-. Our short-term care grade is generally used to judge a nursing home's rehabilitation services To offer good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. Unfortunately, we found that this facility provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. The tricky part is determining what effect this had on quality of care. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients that returned home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was actually quite a bit below average.

Moving on to our last category, this nursing home received a grade of C for long-term care, which is a respectable score. Long-term care grades are based in part on the facility's amount of care. This includes a broad scope of personal care services, ranging from help with activities of daily living to routine medical services. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 99.4382 percent of its patients. This facility also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.