Alhambra Healthcare & Wellness Centre

Although we didn't give this facility a good overall score, we did give it a strong grade in the category of inspections, where it earned a B. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. It is typically in your best interest to avoid places that had a long list of deficiencies. This place was assessed 7 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered severe. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to resident health or safety. A few minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

One of this nursing home's more favorable category scores came in the category of long-term care. This turned out to be its second most respectable category. In that category, we gave this facility a C. Long-term care grades focus on a facility's personal care instead of the skilled therapy and medical services that are critical to a skilled nursing facility. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Thankfully, this facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients, which is an above average statistic. Finally, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home actually received a decent grade in the area of nursing as well. We awarded it a grade of C for that category, which is not a bad score. In calculating a nursing home's nursing rating, we assess the number of hours nurses spend with patients as well as the skill levels of those nurses. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Lastly, despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this place actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is usually a good indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place.

This nursing home's weakest area is short-term care, which is the last area we looked at. In this category, we awarded this nursing home a D. With our short-term care score, we try to forge a meaningful barometer for rehabilitation services. In this process, we analyze the nursing home's level of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. With a score in this range in this category, we weren't surprised to find that this place was well below average in several staffing figures we looked at. In fact, it supplied significantly fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most facilities. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely wasn't a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 4.4 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. At most facilities, around half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.