Royalwood Care Center

This facility's nursing grade was better than its overall grade. With a strong performance in this category, it earned one of our better scores in that category with a B+. We scrutinized the skill-level of nurses employed by the nursing home, as well as the quantity of time those nurses were with residents, in calculating our score in this category. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility California in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving residents even once per day.

In addition, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a grade of B+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. These inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this facility had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple of minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

This nursing home's next best category was long-term care. We gave it a grade of C in this area. This is basically a middle of the pack score in this category. In calculating these long-term care grades, we assess the facility's personal care services. One of the factors we considered after nursing hours is vaccines. Thankfully, this nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its residents. This facility also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The next category we graded is short-term care, is this facility's weakest area. We gave this facility a D in this category. Our short-term care ratings are considered to be most meaningful for those needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires additional skilled nursing. This means not only nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Considering its score in this category, we were not surprised to discover that this nursing home is well below average in terms of the number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its patients based on the data we looked at. Honestly, this was about what we expected here. The final measure we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 3.3 percent of its residents returning home. Unfortunately, this was quite a bit below the national average.