The Terraces at Los Altos Health Facility

On top of being a strong facility overall, it also received A+ government inspections in recent years. Its inspections are virtually perfect. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This place received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered severe. This means that the government inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies an immediate threat to resident safety or health. A couple relatively minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Nursing ratings are primarily associated with a 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-based metrics 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 nursing home California in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of turning residents more frequently.

Turning the page to our third area, we gave this nursing home a grade of A for its short-term care score. This is a dominant grade. In calculating our short-term care grades, we look at the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other licensed professionals. This score is considered to be a solid measure of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last metric we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 5.8 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

The next area we looked at was long-term care, where this facility received a grade of B. This actually was this nursing home's worst category. A nursing home is doing something right when their weakest score still outperforms most other facilities. Nursing homes that excel in this category tend to provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. After looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.