Oakland Healthcare & Wellness Center

On top of performing well in its overall grade, this nursing home performed at an even higher level in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A-. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection scores. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being relatively insignificant. This facility received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that CMS did not deem any of these deficiencies to create an imminent risk to resident health or safety. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so well is that it was given a favorable short-term care grade. Indeed, short-term care turned out to be its second highest category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to score a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To have highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.7 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This nursing home also received a strong nursing score. In fact, we awarded it an above average grade of B in this area. We weighed the licensure of nurses at the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of time those nurses were with patients, in calculating our grade in this category. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed 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 facility California in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving residents more frequently.

Moving on to the last category, this nursing home was given a respectable long-term care score. While this isn't as good as many of its other scores, this is really not a terrible score. Long-term care grades assess a facility's personal care rather than the skilled nursing or medical services that are critical to a rehabilitation facility. One of the factors we considered after nurse's aid hours was vaccines. Fortunately, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. This facility was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.