Regent Care Center of San Marcos

While this facility earned a decent overall score, its inspections grade is notably more impressive than its overall score. Due to a strong government inspection report this year, it received one of our better scores in that category with a grade of B+. Arguably the most significant factor we consider in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This particular nursing home received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report. Overall, this is still a solid inspection report, but we'd always recommend looking into any deficiencies you find troubling.

This nursing home was awarded its next highest category score in the area of short-term care. We gave this nursing home a grade of B- in this category, which is a respectable score. In determining our short-term care ratings, we size up a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This category is more often than not a reliable assessment of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, this nursing home offers both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities offer both. The final metric we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. This place fared well in this metric with 64.2 percent of its patients returning home. This proved to be a big boost to its grade in this category.

This facility's third most favorable category was its long-term care grade, where it was awarded a grade of B-. Our long-term care grade is generally used to judge a facility's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing on the skilled nursing services provided by a rehabilitation facility. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 98.91305 percent of its patients, which is better than the majority of nursing homes. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 1.12 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than most nursing homes.

The final area we looked at is nursing, which turned out to be this nursing home's worst area. We gave it an abysmal F in this category, which is certainly a major disappointment. The nursing rating is based on many subcategories, however, the most important consideration is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home provides 3.1 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. On top of its subpar nursing hour totals, this place earned suboptimal marks in some of the quality-based measures we considered in calculating our nursing grades. We found that more of this place's residents suffered falls which led to serious injury. We believe that many falls could likely be prevented with better nursing care. This metric contributed to this place receiving a poor nursing score.