Sierra Care Center Unit 6

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category. When calculating our nursing ratings, we weigh both nursing hours and the training levels of those nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 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 frequently be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home has earned near flawless inspections in recent years. We gave them an A in this area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be relatively insignificant. Fortunately, although this facility 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 that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

Turning our third area, we gave this nursing home a score of A- for its short-term care grade. This is a dominant grade. Our short-term care grades are based on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a wide spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number 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.

The next area we analyzed is long-term care. We gave this facility one of our better grades in that area, with a B. Even though this is not as dominant as many of this facility's other scores, it is nevertheless a fine grade. Nursing homes that do well in this category tend to provide patients with more supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. One of the factors we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccines. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. This is a proven method to minimize unnecessary hospitalizations for the senior population. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.