Arrowhead Healthcare Center

This facility's overall grade was bolstered by the fact that it has received favorable government inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our better scores in this category, with a B+. This is a much better score than the facility's overall score. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some end up being quite insignificant. While this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

This nursing home also was given a positive long-term care grade. In fact, we gave them a grade of B+ in this category, which happens to be one of our better. When nursing homes receive this type of grade in long-term care it is typically a good sign for resident care and indicates that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. After considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Another reason we rated this facility so highly is that it received an A+ nursing rating. Nursing scores are tied to quality and quantity of nursing care. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Switching gears to our final category, this nursing home received a grade of C for short-term care, which we consider to be a decent rating. Short-term care grades are generally employed to assess a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide highly scored rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. It doesn't look like this facility submitted information on registered nurse or physical therapist staffing. The last item we considered in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is actually below average.