Windsor Gardens Healthcare of the Valley

Although we were down on this nursing home overall, we awarded it a B in nursing. This grade is more impressive than the nursing home's overall grade. We weighed the levels of nurses at the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of time those nurses spent with patients, in calculating our grade in this category. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures 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 facility California in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving a patient at least once a day.

We actually gave this facility a very solid score in the area of inspections as well. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. This is better than many nursing homes in this category. These inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. A couple minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

Unfortunately, this nursing home's next highest category is long-term care. Nevertheless, with a D in this category, it still performed relatively badly. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. After considering the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination record. We were optimistic to discover that this facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia. To our surprise, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Sadly, a few of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.

The next category we analyzed is short-term care, which is this nursing home's least impressive area. We gave this facility a D in this category. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we scrutinize the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This category is more often than not a solid measure of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Given its grade in this area, we weren't surprised to discover that this place was well below average in terms of its number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the figures we assessed. Frankly, this was about what we expected here. The last item we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 3.3 percent of its residents returning home.