Assisted Living La Posada

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Inspection grades are based on many pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This top notch nursing home also dominated in the category of short-term care, where we awarded it a grade of A+. Only a small group of facilities fared better in this category. Our short-term care scores are considered to be most meaningful for patients requiring a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final measure we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that 6.9 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Moving on our third area, this nursing home was given a strong long-term care grade. In fact, it received a grade of A- in this area. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. One of the datapoints we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccines. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. This is a reliable method to avoid unnecessary hospitalizations for the elderly population. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The final category we assessed was nursing, where this facility was awarded an A-. This completed a first-rate report card. Very few nursing homes earned an A- or higher in all four categories. Nursing ratings are based largely on quality and quantity of nursing care. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.