Pacific Care Nursing Center

The primary reason this nursing home received a decent overall score is its impeccable health inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our better grades in that area, with an A-. This is a notably better grade than the facility's overall grade, which was decent but not in the elite range. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

Another one of this nursing home's more favorable category grades was in the category of long-term care. In that area, we gave this nursing home a B. It actually fared better than most nursing homes in this area. Facilities that excel in this category typically provide residents with better supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is significantly higher than most nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. We looked at the licensure of nurses employed by the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of time those nurses worked with residents, in determining our rating in this area. This facility provided just 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Lastly, although this place got dinged a bit for nursing hours, it actually excelled in some of our quality-based measures. With fewer than five percent of its residents experiencing pressure ulcers, it did remarkably well in this subcategory.

The next area we graded is short-term care, which turned out to be this nursing home's worst category. We awarded this facility a grade of D in that area. Sadly, this grade hurt the nursing home's overall grade to some degree. In determining our short-term care grades, we assess the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This grade is more often than not a solid measure of the nursing home's rehabilitation services. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. Finally, we assessed the number of residents that eventually returned home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.