Santa Monica Health Care Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we gave this nursing home an A- for our short-term care grade. In our short-term care rating, we strive to create a meaningful barometer for rehabilitation. In this process, we look at the facility's scope of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. It does not look like this facility provided registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. The final datapoint we considered in this category is the percentage of residents that returned home from the nursing home. We found that 6.1 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

This facility really excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Nursing grades are largely tied to a nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of moving a patient more frequently.

Turning to another of this nursing home's strengths, it also earned a very impressive inspection score. In that category, we gave this nursing home an impressive grade of B+. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This nursing home was hit with 9 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies to create an immediate risk to patient health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

The final area we scored was long-term care. We awarded this nursing home one of our higher grades in this area, with a B. This nursing home ended up being strong in all areas we analyzed. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. After assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.