The Pillars of North County Health & Rehab Center

This facility earned favorable marks in the area of long-term care this year. We gave them one of our better scores in that area, with a B+. This ended up being the nursing home's best grade and helped its profile a fair amount. Nursing homes that do well in this category typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. After we finished looking at the quantity of nursing care, we then looked at the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 98.342545 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia can be a deadly illness for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility does not take any chances. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home also was awarded a positive short-term care score. Indeed, we gave them a B in that area, which happens to be one of our better. Short-term care grades are vital for residents requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a vast spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this facility submitted registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. The last datapoint we assessed in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

This nursing home received a good score in the area of inspections as well. In fact, we awarded it a B- for that category, which is one of our better scores. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively minor. This place was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered severe. This indicates that the inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to create an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Moving on to the next category, this facility was awarded an acceptable nursing score of C. We scrutinized the licensure of nurses employed by the facility, in addition to the quantity of hours the nurses worked with patients, in determining our score in this category. This nursing home provided just 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a low total compared with most other facilities. Finally, despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this facility actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is usually a good indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place.