Artesia Christian Home

In addition to being a quality facility overall, this facility especially excelled in our inspections category, where it earned a grade of A-. Not many nursing homes fared better in that category. Inspection ratings are tied to several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

Additionally, this nursing home also was awarded favorable short-term care scores this year. In fact, we gave them one of our stronger grades in that category, with a grade of B+. Our short-term care grade is often used to score a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to have highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. It does not look like this nursing home provided registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. Lastly, we considered the number of patients that were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. Nursing grades are heavily correlated with nurse staffing levels. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving residents more often.

The last area we looked at was long-term care, where this nursing home was awarded a B. This nursing home turned out to be very solid in each category we looked at. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it typically means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. After looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is significantly higher than the average nursing home. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.