Veterans Home of California - Redding

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility excelled in our nursing rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. When calculating a nursing home's nursing rating, we consider the amount of time nurses are caring for residents as well as the skill levels of the nurses. This facility provided 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed 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 the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a policy of turning a resident at least once a day.

We also awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our short-term care grade. In the area of short-term care, we try to assess measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We look at a nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Turning to another of this facility's strengths, it also received a very impressive inspection score. In fact, inspections proved to be one of its best grades. In that category, we awarded this nursing home an impressive grade of B+. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection grades. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are quite minor. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

The next category we assessed is long-term care, which ended up being this nursing home's weakest area. It received a lowly F in this area, which is obviously somewhat disappointing. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination statistics. We were pleased to find that this nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Sadly, a few of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.