Redwood Convalescent Hospital

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this place really excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A-. Few facilities performed better in this area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite minor. This facility received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies to be an imminent threat to resident health or safety. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

Additionally, we also wanted to point out that this facility was awarded positive long-term care marks in this assessment. We gave them one of our better grades in this area, with a grade of B. This proved to be the facility's second strongest score. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 98.290596 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients healthy. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The next category we looked at is short-term care. In that category, we awarded this facility a decent grade of C. In determining our short-term care scores, we assess a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This grade is generally a reliable measure of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Unfortunately, we weren't able to track down information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. The final statistic we considered in this area is the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

The next category we graded is nursing, which turned out to be this facility's least impressive category. We gave this nursing home a D in that category. Sadly, this category hurt the nursing home's overall grade to a certain degree. Our nursing grade analyzes the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of training of those nurses and the amount of time spent with residents. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. In addition to its weak nursing hour totals, this nursing home also received poor marks in several of the quality-based metrics we looked at in calculating our nursing ratings. We found that a higher percentage of this facility's patients suffered falls which led to serious injury. We would argue that many falls could be avoided with better nursing care. This statistic contributed to this facility receiving a terrible nursing grade.