University Post-Acute Rehab

We also wanted to emphasize that this nursing home received an impressive grade of A in our short-term care category. In computing our short-term care ratings, we scrutinize the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other licensed professionals. This grade is considered to be a useful assessment of the facility's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients that eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 5.5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

This facility has received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A- in this category. Inspection ratings are based on several datapoints located in the a nursing home's government inspections. Facilities that score well in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. When calculating a facility's nursing grade, we consider the amount of time nurses spend with patients as well as the levels of training of those nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility California in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a protocol of turning a resident even once per day.

The final category we looked at was long-term care, where this facility was given a grade of B. While this turned out to be its least impressive category grade, this is still a strong rating. Facilities that receive this kind of grade in this category typically provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure patients are well cared for. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is far higher than most nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.