Pacific Palms Healthcare

Pacific Palms Healthcare is located in Long Beach, California, which appears to have a variety of nursing homes. Featuring an overall grade of D, this is a relatively poor facility. Long Beach received a city grade of B-, so there are other options in the city worth looking at. The best thing we can really say about this place is that it did not receive any F's in in any of the major categories. More information about these categories can be found below.

While we were not high on this nursing home overall, we awarded it a B- for inspections. This grade is better than the facility's overall score. We would argue that one of the most critical factors in evaluating an inspection report is deficiencies. We especially look at the severity of the deficiencies. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This means that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Lastly, this nursing home was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. This is generally a really bad sign. We would never recommend this facility.

We also want to point out that this facility received a decent grade in our nursing category. We awarded it a grade of B- in the area. Nursing scores are largely based on the facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides an impressive 4.7 hours of nursing care per resident each day. Lastly, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these statistics. With fewer than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it fared very well in this datapoint. This is typically an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as having a protocol of turning residents at least once a day.

This facility's third best category was short-term care. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-. Our short-term care ratings are based on the facility's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a broad spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, in addition to other variations of therapy. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than the typical facility. The hope is always that this does not adversely affect the quality of care. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This was a much stronger area for this facility. We found that it outperformed most facilities in this area with 64.3 percent of its residents returning home. This really helped its score in this area.

Turning to our final category, this nursing home was awarded an acceptable long-term care grade of B-. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. After we finished looking at the volume of care provided by nurses, we next considered the facility's vaccination record. We were optimistic to find that this facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia. This place keeps 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 figure.