Veterans Home of California - Fresno

We also would like to note that this nursing home excelled in our nursing score. We awarded them an A+ in this category. The nursing rating features many datapoints. The most important one is the number of hours nurses spent with residents. This nursing home averages 0.7 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 nursing home the country 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 by employing a policy of moving a resident at least once a day.

The next category we looked at was inspections, where this facility also received an A+ grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Inspection scores are tied to several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's inspections. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This facility was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered severe. This means that CMS did not deem any of these deficiencies to pose an immediate threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Turning our next category, this nursing home was awarded a strong short-term care grade. In fact, we awarded it a score of A in that area. In the area of short-term care, we seek to evaluate measures of a facility's rehabilitation services. We assess a nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

In our final category, we awarded this nursing home an A+ for its long-term care grade. This finished off a very strong profile. When facilities receive this kind of grade in long-term care it is usually a good sign for resident care and indicates that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is far higher than the average nursing home. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.