South Marin Health & Wellness Center

To go along with its strong overall score, we gave this nursing home an A for our nursing rating. The nursing category is based on a handful of subcategories, most of which are tied to quantities of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 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 nursing home 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 generally be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home received a strong short-term care grade as well. We gave it one of our higher grades in that category with a grade of B+. In determining our short-term care ratings, we look at a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This category is frequently a reliable measure of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final datapoint we considered in this area is the number of patients who who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Another area of strength for this nursing home is in the area of inspections. In fact, inspections proved to be one of its best categories. In that category, we awarded this facility a grade of B. Inspection ratings account for several factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher grades in this category typically have few severe deficiencies. We weren't able to locate deficiency counts for this nursing home. Without having access to the information regarding deficiencies for this nursing home, it ended up being challenging to assess the place in the area of inspections.

The last area we assessed is long-term care. This facility was given a strong long-term care score this year, with a B. This facility truly did not have any weak areas. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. One of the statistics we considered after nursing hours was vaccinations. It doesn't appear that this nursing home provided information about vaccinations. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.