The Springs at Pacific Regent

In addition to being a strong facility overall, this facility also excelled in the category of short-term care, where it received an A+. In computing our short-term care ratings, we assess a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This score is considered to be a meaningful measure of a facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we assessed in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 7.4 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B+ for our inspections rating. Nursing ratings are primarily associated with the facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.5 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 facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a policy of moving a patient even once per day.

This nursing home also excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned an impressive grade of B+. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

The last area we scored proved to be this facility's worst category. Nevertheless, even in its weakest link we still awarded it an acceptable grade of B- for our long-term care category. For prospective residents in need of a permanent residence rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. One of the factors we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccinations. It doesn't look like this nursing home provided information on its vaccination levels. Finally, this facility was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.