Madera Rehabilitation & Nursing Center

This nursing home received an elite long-term care score. We gave this nursing home an A in this area, which helped out its overall grade. Nursing homes that receive this kind of grade in this category typically provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure residents are well cared for. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. Nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that category, we awarded this facility an B. The nursing rating assesses several subcategories, however, the primary one is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. 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 place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home earned its third best grade in inspections. Inspection grades are based on a facility's recent government inspection reports. We awarded this facility a C in this category. 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. Surprisingly, this place was assessed a category J through K deficiency, which are among the worst deficiencies. This often tells you that inspectors uncovered a deficiency which placed patient health or safety in immediate danger. Unfortunately, we also need to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received significant government fines in recent years.

The next area we scored was short-term care, which turned out to be this nursing home's weakest area. We gave this nursing home a D in that area. Sadly, this score hurt the facility's overall profile a bit. Short-term care grades are often used to gauge a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to provide high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to have better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Unfortunately, we discovered that this nursing home offers fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most facilities. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents who ultimately returned home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 3.9 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.