The Terraces at Los Altos Health Facility

On top of being a top notch facility overall, this place also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A. Not many facilities performed better in this category. Arguably the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This place was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the government inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to be an imminent risk to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

On the list of its many elite scores, this facility was awarded first-rate short-term care score. In fact, it received a score of A in this area. Our short-term care ratings are believed to be most meaningful for people requiring rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation typically mandates additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not just nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final item we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that 6.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Contributing to its fine profile, this facility also was given a superb long-term care score, with a grade of A-. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. One of the factors we considered after nursing hours is vaccines. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 80.76923 percent of its residents. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, we were pleased to find nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The last category we graded is nursing. In this category, we awarded this nursing home an acceptable grade of B-. This is this nursing home's least impressive category. The nursing score analyzes several factors, but the paramount consideration is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home averages just 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Lastly, despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this nursing home actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is often a good indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place.