La Palma Nursing Center

In addition to receiving a strong overall grade, this nursing home also received excellent health inspections recently. We awarded it one of our best scores in that area, with an A. Our inspection grades are based on many items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This place was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that the inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to create an imminent risk to resident health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category. Our nursing rating is mostly associated with the facility's level of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This nursing home also fared very well in the category of short-term care, where it received a score of A. Only a select group of nursing homes performed better in this category. Our short-term care grade is often employed to gauge a facility's rehabilitation services In order to offer quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients that were able to return home from this facility. We found that 5.6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The next category we looked at was long-term care. This facility received a very good nursing rating this year, with a B. While this was not quite as good as several of its other category grades, this is still one of the better grades in this area. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in this category it is usually a good sign for patient care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. After considering the volume of care provided by nurses, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is often a dangerous illness for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.