Arcadia Health Care Center

One of the reasons this is a decent nursing home is it received a favorable inspection score. In this category, we gave this nursing home a B. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection ratings. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be relatively insignificant. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

Additionally, we also would like to point out that this nursing home was given impressive long-term care marks this year. We gave them one of our more impressive grades in this category, with a B. This proved to be the nursing home's second strongest grade. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. On top of considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients, which is more than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home also received a strong nursing grade. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B in that category, which is one of our better scores. We assessed the licensure of nurses employed by the nursing home, as well as the quantity of time those nurses were with patients, in determining our grade in this area. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This facility's worst area was short-term care, which is the last category we assessed. In this category, we gave this facility a grade of D. In computing our short-term care grades, we assess the facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This category is frequently a fair measure of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Not surprisingly, we discovered that this nursing home offers significantly less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than a typical facility. The final datapoint we assessed in this area is the number of patients who ultimately returned home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 4.5 percent of its patients returning home. This was well below the national average.