Alhambra Convalescent Hospital

In addition to receiving a strong overall score, this place also earned first-rate inspections in recent years. We gave it one of our best scores in that area, with an A-. Inspection scores are tied to many pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This means 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 rare in the industry.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing score. In fact, nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that category, we awarded this nursing home an B+. We scrutinized the licensure of nurses at the nursing home, as well as the quantity of time those nurses were with residents, in calculating our score in this area. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at 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 nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving patients more often.

This nursing home received a strong long-term care score as well. We gave it one of our higher scores in that area with a score of B. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. After looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Switching gears to the next category, this nursing home was given a grade of C for short-term care, which is generally a respectable rating. Our short-term care grade is typically employed to score a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To provide good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. It doesn't appear that this facility provided information about its staffing of registered nurses or physical therapists. The last item we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that just 4.6 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is actually below average.