State Center Specialty Care

This nursing home received a strong overall grade as discussed above, but we especially wanted to point out its excellent nursing rating. We gave them a grade of A in this area. There are a variety of criteria within this category. Many of the factors relate to levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of turning a patient at least once a day.

We also wanted to emphasize this nursing home's nearly flawless inspections recently. We gave them an impressive grade of A in this category. These inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This facility was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This tells you that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to create an immediate risk to patient safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

This facility received a favorable short-term care score as well. We gave it one of our higher scores in that area with a grade of B+. Short-term care scores are based in part on the nursing home's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a wide scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, not to mention other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

This facility's least impressive area was long-term care, which is the last category we scored. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F for this area. Despite some strong grades in other categories, this score is nevertheless somewhat alarming so we would like to to point it out. Nursing homes that do not fare well in long-term care typically aren't as well-staffed and are lagging in a few of the areas of routine healthcare services we looked at. After assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 93.75 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which happens to be somewhat below what we were hoping for but still a reasonably acceptable figure. Surprisingly, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had less hospitalizations than most nursing homes. This is its best score in this category.