Orchards Skilled Nursing

In addition to being an elite nursing home overall, this nursing home also excelled in our inspections category, where it earned a grade of A+. Very few places performed this well in this area. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection ratings. One of those factors is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some are relatively insignificant. It does not look like we have deficiency data for this facility. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Compounding its strong accomplishments in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for its long-term care grade. In a long-term care environment, the primary goal is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. This nursing home clearly performed well enough in these metrics to receive a quality score in this category.

This facility also was given an impressive short-term care score. In fact, we awarded it an above average score of B+ in this area. Our short-term care grades are vital for prospective residents in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. This means a vast scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Remarkably, this facility provides approximately one and a half times as many hours of services from registered nurses and physical therapists than most facilities we assessed. The last item we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

Moving on to the last area, this facility also excelled in the nursing category. We gave it a B+ in that area. This topped off a very impressive profile. The nursing score includes numerous data points. The most heavily weighted variable is the amount of time nurses spend with patients. This nursing home provided 6.8 hours of nursing care per resident each day, which is among the higher figures in the country. A significant percentage of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are one of the more skilled levels of nurses. We were really impressed by these statistics. On top of providing impressive levels of care, this place also excelled in the quality-based metrics we looked at. By way of illustration, it performed as well as any facility in California in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We look at these areas as predictive measures of the quality of nursing care being provided.