Sherwood Oaks

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this nursing home has received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We gave them an A+ in this category. These inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Contributing to its top-shelf profile, this nursing home also excelled in our short-term care area. In fact, we gave it a score of A for the area. In calculating our short-term care grades, we scrutinize the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This area is frequently a meaningful measure of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.1 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This nursing home also was superb in the category of long-term care, where we gave it a score of A. Not many nursing homes received a better grade in this category. For residents looking for a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 75.18248 percent of its residents, which is somewhat lower than we expected. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we had hoped, we were pleased to find facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Switching gears to our fourth category, this nursing home also performed well in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B+ in that area. This completed a very impressive profile. Nursing grades are based largely on nurse staffing levels. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.