ProMedica ManorCare Health Services-Palm Desert

This nursing home really excelled at short-term care, with an impressive grade of A- in this category. Our short-term care grades are probably more important for those needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation usually utilizes additional skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final measure we considered in this area is the percentage of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that 5.3 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Turning to the category of nursing, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- in that area. Our nursing grade is primarily tied to the nursing home's nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of turning residents even once per day.

Turning to the area of health inspections, we gave this nursing home a grade of C for our inspection category. Our inspection scores are tied to pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important thing to look for on these reports. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to patient safety. This facility was hit with 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were in any of the categories labeled J through L. This indicates that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to put patient safety or health in imminent harm or jeopardy. At the end of the day, this inspection could have been worse.

The final category we analyzed was long-term care, which turned out to be this facility's worst area. We awarded this facility a grade of D in that category. Naturally, this category hurt the facility's overall grade to some degree. For prospective residents seeking a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are an important measure. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 96.666664 percent of its patients, which is more than the majority of nursing homes. Surprisingly, this facility also keeps its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.