Ridgecrest Village

In addition to being a first rate nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in the category of nursing, where it received a grade of A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. There are a host of factors within this grade. Many of these criteria reflect levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can typically be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Turning to our inspection category, this nursing home excelled in that area, which is based on the nursing home's government inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A for that category. Inspection scores are based on several items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this category have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This nursing home was hit with 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to resident safety or health. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

Turning the page to our next area, this nursing home received an excellent short-term care score. In fact, we gave it a score of A in that area. In our short-term care grade, we try to forge a valuable barometer for rehabilitation. In doing so, we analyze a facility's level of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we considered in this area is the number of residents that eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that 5.4 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

The last area we looked at was long-term care. This facility received an impressive long-term care score this year, with a grade of C. Even though this was not quite as elite as several of its other scores, this is nevertheless a decent rating in this category. With our long-term care score, we look at the quantity of services offered by a facility, along with some qualitative measures. After considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination record. We were pleased to find that this nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Lastly, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.