San Marcos Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center

One of the reasons this ended up being a quality facility is that it earned a very impressive inspection score. In fact, inspections is its best category grade. In this area, we awarded it an A. Inspection ratings weigh a host of factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher grades in this area tend to have very few of these severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among this facility's other achievements is its top-shelf long-term care score. We gave them one of our best grades in that area, with a score of A-. Facilities that excel in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly is often a deadly health condition for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home does not leave this to chance. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The next area we analyzed was short-term care. This nursing home received an above average short-term care grade, with a grade of B in the category. Our short-term care ratings are based on a nursing home's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a broad spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Moving on to our final area, this nursing home received a C in nursing, which we consider to be a respectable score. We weighed the qualifications of nurses employed by the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of time the nurses worked with residents, in computing our rating in this area. This nursing home provides 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics. While this nursing home got docked a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it excelled in some of these quality-based measures. With fewer than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed well in this metric. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of moving a patient at least once a day.