Pacific Palms Healthcare

In addition to being a quality nursing home overall, this facility really excelled in nursing, where it received an A-. Our nursing score includes quite a few components, most of which are tied to nursing hours. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at 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 nursing home California in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of moving a patient at least once a day.

Turning to another one of this facility's strengths, it also received a very impressive inspection grade. Inspections proved to be one of its best categories. In that area, we gave this nursing home a grade of B+. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some can be relatively insignificant. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

The next category we graded is short-term care. This nursing home received an impressive short-term care grade, with a B in the category. Short-term care grades are generally employed to grade a facility's rehabilitation services To have good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must offer higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. We were not able to locate information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients that returned home from this nursing home. We found that 4.8 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

The next area we assessed is long-term care, where we gave it a favorable grade of B. This facility really did not have any weaknesses. When nursing homes receive this kind of grade in long-term care it is usually a good sign for patient care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. One of the factors we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccinations. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccination to 99.69136 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a great way to avoid unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the senior population. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.