Life Care Center of Escondido

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it earned a strong short-term care grade. In that category, we awarded this facility an A. In determining our short-term care ratings, we scrutinize the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This rating is generally a useful measure of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Unfortunately, we were not able to find information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 6.1 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

Turning to inspections, this facility excelled in that area, which is based on the nursing home's recent inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A for that category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection scores. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these end up being relatively insignificant. While this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- in that category. In determining our nursing scores, we look at both nursing hours and the levels of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Moving on to our next area, this nursing home received a very strong long-term care grade. Although this was not as impressive as some of its other scores, this is nevertheless one of our more impressive scores we offer. Facilities that excel in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 97.7707 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia tragically can be a life or death condition for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.