Palomino Place

This nursing home received a quality overall grade as described above, but we especially want to emphasize its nearly flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded it an impressive grade of A+ in this area. Arguably the most significant factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this category most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This particular nursing home received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among the reasons we rated this nursing home so well is that it was awarded a favorable long-term care grade. In fact, long-term care ended up being its second best category score. In that category, we gave this facility a score of A-. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. After considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of C. While this didn't quite match its scores in some of the categories discussed above, this is still a decent score. The nursing rating weighs a host of datapoints. The most heavily weighted factor is the amount of time nurses spend with residents. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a low total compared with most other facilities. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures. While this nursing home got dinged a bit for nursing hours, it excelled in some of these quality-based metrics. With less than five percent of its patients experiencing pressure ulcers, it performed very well in this statistic. This is often an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a policy of turning a resident more frequently.

The next area we graded is short-term care. We gave this nursing home a D in the area of short-term care, leaving this as the facility's least impressive category. In the category of short-term care, we endeavor to assess indicators of a facility's rehabilitation. We assess a nursing home's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. In this place's case, we found that it provided less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than a typical facility. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. This was not a strength for this facility. We found that just 4.7 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.