Saylor Lane Healthcare Center

The primary reason this nursing home received a decent overall grade is its impeccable health inspections in recent years. We gave it one of our better scores in that category, with an A. This is a much better grade than the place's overall grade, which was decent but certainly not elite. Inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This means the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

In addition, we also would like to note that this facility was given positive short-term care marks this year. We gave them one of our more favorable grades in this category, with a grade of B. This turned out to be the facility's second best grade. In calculating our short-term care grades, we look at a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. This score is typically a solid measure of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. One of this nursing home's strength is that it offers more hours of physical therapy per week to its residents. The final metric we assessed in this category is the number of residents that returned home from the nursing home. We found that it performed as well as just about any nursing home in California in this area with 57.8 percent of its patients returning home. For most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of C, which is a decent grade. Nursing ratings are based largely on quality and quantity of nursing care. Based on the data, it looks like this place provides an impressive 4 hours per patient on a daily basis. This is more nursing care than most places offer. In computing our grades, we apply more weight to hours performed by more highly trained nurses such as registered or licensed nurses. Lastly, we also considered quality measures in calculating our nursing ratings. This nursing home was above average in several of the major statistics we assessed, including minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

Our last category is long-term care, in which we gave this nursing home a grade of C in that area. For patients in need of a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care grades are an important measure. In addition to considering the impressive volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff at this nursing home, we also were happy with the facility's record for vaccinations. This facility gave the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is an impressive total. This combination proved to be successful as this nursing home keeps its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.