San Diego Healthcare Center

This place's long-term care rating is more impressive than its overall score. Due to a strong performance in this area, it earned one of our higher scores in that area with a grade of B+. When facilities receive this type of grade in this category it is typically a good sign for patient care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 99.903755 percent of its patients, which is more than the average nursing home. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Another one of this nursing home's stronger areas was in the category of nursing care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of B. Nursing ratings are primarily tied to a facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This facilities third best area was short-term care. We awarded it a B- in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. Our short-term care grades are arguably more meaningful for people in need of rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically utilizes additional skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not merely nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, this place was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its patients based on the metrics we assessed. The last statistic we considered in this area is the number of residents who returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 4.6 percent of this facility's residents returned home. This figure was below average.

The final category we assessed was inspections. This facility did not receive favorable inspections in recent years. We gave it an F in this category. This ended up pulling down this nursing home's overall grade quite a bit. For nursing homes with bad inspection grades, you should really scrutinize any severe deficiencies found on their inspection reports. This particular nursing home had 5 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only positive thing we can say is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that suggest that they created a threat to resident health or safety. Finally, we would like to point out that this facility received significant government fines recently exceeding $50,000. This generally means that government inspectors became frustrated after multiple years of failed health inspections.