San Juan Living Center

While this facility's overall score was rock bottom, it actually didn't perform as badly in the area of nursing. In fact, we awarded it a B- for that area. When calculating our nursing scores, we look at both nursing hours and the training levels of the nurses. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures. While this nursing home got docked a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it excelled in some of these quality-based measures. With less than five percent of its patients experiencing pressure ulcers, it did remarkably well in this statistic. This can be an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a system of turning residents more often.

We were also pleasantly surprised to find that this nursing home received a decent short-term care rating this year. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. Our short-term care grade is generally used to score a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the metrics we assessed. The real question is whether this adversely affected quality of care. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 4.5 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

This nursing home didn't perform horribly in the area of inspections. We gave it a C for that area. The last category we looked at actually turned out to be the source of this nursing home's bottom of the barrel overall grade. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some are relatively minor. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, CMS flagged this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. This is not what you want to see. We advise you to direct your search elsewhere.

Switching gears to the next category, this nursing home didn't perform well in this category either. Due to a rock bottom grade of F in long-term care, this is really as as uninspiring as it gets. Facilities that don't fare well in long-term care typically aren't as well-staffed and are lagging in some of the areas of routine personal care we looked at. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. As it turns out, this facility vaccinated a relatively low 88.888885 percent of its residents, which is not a very encouraging sign. Surprisingly, this facility actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.