La Sierra Care Center

Although we were not high on this nursing home overall, we awarded it a B for long-term care. This score is far more impressive than the nursing home's overall grade. Without this grade, this place's profile would have been even worse. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in this category it is a good sign for patient care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. One of the datapoints we considered after nursing hours was vaccines. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a great way to minimize negative health outcomes for the elderly population. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

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 largely associated with a facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a low total compared to most other nursing homes. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures. While this nursing home got docked a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in some of these quality-based measures. With less than five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it did well in this subcategory. This is typically a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of moving a resident even once per day.

This nursing home received mediocre government inspections in recent years. We gave them a grade of C in this area. We believe that one of the most important factors in evaluating an inspection report is deficiencies. In this regard, we especially look at the severity of the deficiencies. This nursing home was hit with 3 deficiencies on its government inspection report, but we were relieved to find that none were category J through L deficiencies. This means CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies to place patient health or safety in imminent harm or jeopardy. Unfortunately, we also need to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received significant government fines in recent years.

The last area we analyzed is short-term care, which proved to be a weak link for this nursing home. We awarded this nursing home a D for our short-term care category. Short-term care scores are based in part on the facility's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a vast scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, not to mention other types of therapy. Given its poor score in this category, we weren't shocked to learn that this nursing home offers substantially fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most other nursing homes. The last datapoint we considered in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics was damning for this facility's short-term care grade.