Manorcare Health Services - Tice Valley

With an address in Walnut Creek, California, Manorcare Health Services - Tice Valley is one of five available nursing homes there. It looks like this nursing home is one of the top facilities we found. A grade in this range requires superb marks across the board. We can't find many bad things to say about this nursing home. Its grades are as good as they get. Headlining this place's stellar report card is its short-term care rating, which you can find in the next section.

In addition to being a first rate nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in the area of short-term care, where it earned an A. In determining our short-term care ratings, we look at a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This rating is frequently a solid assessment of a facility's rehabilitation services. This nursing home is substantially above the national average in terms of its quantity of both physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents. In fact, it provided about 50% more care per resident from both of these care providers than the average facility provided. These are generally good indicators of quality short-term care. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that it outperformed the majority of nursing homes with 50.4 percent of its patients returning home. This is a better rate than most nursing homes.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category. Our nursing score is primarily based on a nursing home's nurse staffing. This place provided 4.9 hours of nursing care per patient daily, which is among the better figures in the country. A significant percentage of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are one of the most highly skilled levels of nurses. We were very impressed by both of these statistics. On top of looking at levels of nursing care, we also looked at a few quality measures in determining our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these metrics as reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

In addition, this facility also received excellent inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our best scores in that area, with an A. Inspection grades weigh a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher grades in this category usually have very few severe deficiencies. While this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few relatively minor dings are not necessarily something to panic about.

Turning to the final category, this facility also performed admirably in our long-term care category. In fact, we gave it a B+ in this category. This wrapped up a first-rate profile. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. In addition to offering elite levels of nurse staffing, this nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. The last datapoint we assessed is its hospitalization rate. Here we found that this facility had 2.34 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days.