Waterman Canyon Post Acute

The primary reason this nursing home received a decent overall score is its excellent government inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our higher scores in that area, with an A-. This is a much better score than the place's overall score, which was decent but certainly not elite. Inspection ratings are tied to several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel 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 endangerment of patients. This nursing home was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered severe. This means that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies to cause an immediate risk to resident health or safety. A few minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

One of this nursing home's better category scores came in the area of long-term care. This turned out to be its second most favorable category. In that category, we awarded this facility a C. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. Unfortunately, it looks like we are missing some of this facility's data for this category. Without the data for this facility, it ended up being a challenge to really grade it in the area of long-term care.

Unfortunately, this facility only received a grade of D for its short-term care score, which is not one of our better scores. In computing these short-term care scores, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our purpose is to formulate a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of different facilities. As you might expect, we discovered that this nursing home offers substantially less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than a typical facility. The final statistic we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics sunk this facility's short-term care grade.

The next area we rated is nursing, which ended up being a weak link for this nursing home. We awarded this nursing home a D for nursing. Our nursing score assesses the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of licensure of the nurses and the quantity of hours spent with residents. This nursing home provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is an alarmingly low total. Finally, to round out our nursing grade, we turn to some quality-focused statistics in rounding out our nursing scores. Specifically, we look at the percent of patients who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these metrics as predictive measures of the quality of nursing care, since better care tends to reduce these problems.