Santa Rosa Care Center

While this nursing home's overall grade was not bad, it really excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our best scores. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are quite minor. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This means CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor dings are not the end of the world.

Another one of this facility's more impressive category grades came in the category of long-term care. In that area, we gave this nursing home a grade of B. If you are seeking anything other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care scores. On top of considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 92.6078 percent of its patients, which is a bit lower than we expected. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. Our nursing score looks at the facility's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of training of the nurses as well as the amount of time spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility actually excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. It scored well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the number of hours of care offered.

Switching gears to our next area, we gave this facility a D for the area of short-term care. This was the nursing home's worst category score. Unfortunately, this grade hurt the nursing home's overall grade a bit. Our short-term care grade is typically employed to score a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. We found that this nursing home was subpar in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its patients based on the staffing figures we looked at. Lastly, we considered the number of patients that returned home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.