Pacific Coast Manor

To pair with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. Our short-term care grade is often employed to assess a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To offer high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to have better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of patients that who were able to eventually return home from this facility. We found that 7 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

In addition, this nursing home received excellent inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of A. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with higher grades in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. Our nursing score is mostly associated with a facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next area we looked at was nursing, turned out to be this nursing home's least impressive area. We awarded this facility a D in this area. This really is one of the couple of weak points in a very solid report card. In a long-term care environment, the primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. One of the factors we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. Fortunately, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.