Ranch Terrace Nursing Home

Even though we didn't rate this nursing home favorably overall, we actually gave it an excellent score in long-term care, where it received an A-. Few facilities performed better in this particular area. This helped its overall profile to a degree. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 90.909096 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is slightly below what we were hoping for but still a reasonably acceptable figure. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Shockingly, this nursing home actually earned a good score in inspections as well. In fact, we gave it a B for that category, which is one of our better grades. Few nursing homes that were this poor overall received multiple category grades of this caliber. Arguably the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. It is typically in your best interest to avoid nursing homes that had too many severe deficiencies. Although this place had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

The third area we graded is short-term care, where this nursing home received an F. Our short-term care scores are believed to be most important for patients requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally mandates additional skilled nursing. This means not merely nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other types of therapy. With a score in this range in this category, we were not stunned to learn this facility was below average in several staffing areas we looked at. It supplied far fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. This wasn't a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.

The last area we graded was nursing. This facility received a rock bottom grade of F in that category. Nursing grades are tied to quality and quantity of nursing care. With just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident daily, this place's nurse staffing levels were significantly below average. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing scores. This facility performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.