The Springs at Pacific Regent

The Springs at Pacific Regent is a small nursing home in San Diego, California. This facility was awarded an A- overall, which is one of our better ratings. Indeed, we were so impressed with this nursing home that we rated it ahead of most of the nursing homes in San Diego, which has a strong selection of nursing homes. This facility's strong profile was highlighted by its short-term care score, which we will address in the next section.

In addition to being a first-rate nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in our short-term care rating, where it received an A+. Few facilities performed better in this area. In crafting these short-term care scores, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our purpose is to devise a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. This nursing home is the gold standard in terms of skilled nursing staffing. It provided approximately one and a half times as many registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than a typical nursing home. This is what we look for when assessing a nursing home in this category. The final measure we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it performed as well as just about any facility in California in this area with 71.2 percent of its patients returning home. For most facilities, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

This facility also earned an A+ inspection grade, making it one of the rare facilities to receive multiple A+'s in our categories. This grade is based on the place's inspections. An A+ in this category is one of the highest complements we can pay to a nursing home. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some can be quite minor. This nursing home received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies an imminent threat to resident health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. The nursing grade weighs several datapoints, many of which are associated with nursing hours. This particular nursing home provided 5.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This was one of the higher totals we found. Furthermore, a significant portion of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. These are both really impressive figures. On top of offering high levels of care, this place also excelled in the quality measures we assessed. For example, it performed as well as any nursing home in California in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these datapoints as good indicators of the caliber of nursing care provided.

The final area we assessed was long-term care, where this facility was awarded a C. This turned out to be this nursing home's least impressive area. This is nevertheless a middle of the pack score. For residents in need of a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Unfortunately, we were not able to track down this facility's vaccination rates. Lastly, this facility excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.