Las Palmas Healthcare Center

We want to point out that this nursing home outperformed its overall score in the category of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, we gave it one of our highest scores in this area with an A-. Arguably the most significant factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This place was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe. This indicates that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to be an imminent risk to resident health or safety. A few minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

This facility's next best area was its long-term care grade, where it was given a grade of B-. For long-term care residents, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 99.6337 percent of its residents, which is more than most nursing homes. Lastly, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The third most favorable category we gave this nursing home in any area came in the category of short-term care, where we gave it a grade of C. With our short-term care rating, we try to craft a meaningful gauge for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we analyze a facility's levels of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Unfortunately, this place was below average in terms of its number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its patients based on the metrics we assessed. The last item we looked at in this area is the number of patients who returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 5.5 percent of this facility's patients returned home. This figure was below average.

The final area we assessed was nursing, which ended up being a low point for this facility. We gave this facility a grade of just D in the area of nursing. Nursing ratings are tied to quantity of nursing care available. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. This place performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these metrics to be good measures of the quality of nursing care.