Arbor Hills Nursing Center

Arbor Hills Nursing Center is one of seven facilities located in La Mesa, California. This is a strong nursing home with a grade of B+ overall. We were pleased to find out that many of the other facilities in La Mesa received similar grades. You could certainly do much worse than this facility. This place was stronger in some categories than others, but it did not have any bad scores in any of the major categories. More information about these categories can be found below.

In addition to faring well overall, this facility also earned a nearly flawless inspection report. As a result, it received one of our best scores in that area with an A+. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection grades. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively insignificant. This nursing home was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe. This tells you that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to create an imminent threat to resident health or safety. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

Contributing to this facility's list of strengths, it also received a superb short-term care score. We gave them a strong grade of A- in this category. In calculating our short-term care grades, we size up a facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This rating is considered to be a fair assessment of a nursing home's rehabilitation. This facility increased its rating in this category by offering more than one and a half times as many hours of physical therapy than the average facility. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of facilities in the country in this area with 57.3 percent of its patients returning home.

This facility received a very good nursing grade this year as well. It received one of our better scores in that category with a grade of B. Our nursing score analyzes the facility's level of nurse staffing. We consider both the levels of training of those nurses as well as the number of hours spent with residents. With 4.1 hours of nursing care per resident daily, this nursing home surpassed the overwhelming majority of nursing homes. Finally, this facility also excelled in several of the quality-based metrics we looked at. With fewer than five percent of its residents experiencing pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the country in this category. This is typically an indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Many pressure ulcers can be avoided by providing better nursing care and having a protocol of turning patients even once per day.

The last category we rated turned out to be this facility's poorest area. However, even in its worst category we still gave it a respectable grade of B- for our long-term care category. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. One of the statistics we considered on top of this nursing home's very solid nursing hours was vaccinations. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a reliable method to avoid unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the nursing home population. This combination proved to be effective as this place was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 1.18 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a much better hospitalization rate than most nursing homes.