Sun Mar Nursing Center

To pair with a favorable overall grade, we gave this nursing home an A+ for our inspection category. Our inspection grades are based on many datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this category have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a 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 performed well in our long-term care category. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in the area. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents, which is significantly higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Turning our third area, this facility received a top-shelf short-term care grade. In fact, we awarded it a score of A in this category. Our short-term care scores are vital for patients seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires additional skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes a wide range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients that eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 6.1 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

In the last area, we gave this nursing home an A+ for our nursing score. This completed a very strong profile. The nursing score weighs a number of factors. The most heavily weighted variable is the number of hours nurses spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility California in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a policy of turning patients even once per day.