Life Care Center of Escondido

In addition to being a quality nursing home overall, this nursing home really excelled at short-term care, where it earned an A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Our short-term care grades are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This includes a wide range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.1 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Among this facility's other strengths is its elite nursing grade. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of A-. We scrutinized the qualifications of nurses employed by the nursing home, as well as the number of hours the nurses spent with residents, in calculating our grade in this area. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home 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.

In addition, this nursing home also excelled in the category of inspections, where it received a grade of A-. Few facilities performed better in this category. These inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This place was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe. This indicates that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies an immediate threat to resident safety or health. A few minor dings aren't the end of the world.

This nursing home's least impressive area is long-term care, which is the last category we scored. For this area, we awarded this facility an D. We want to to point out this potential weak spot, however, you shouldn't dwell on one bad area either. For patients in need of a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is better than most nursing homes. To our surprise, this facility also fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.