La Mesa Healthcare Center

With an address in La Mesa, California, La Mesa Healthcare Center is one of seven facilities in the city. This is a strong facility with a grade of B+ overall. We were pleased to find out that many of the other nursing homes in La Mesa received similar scores. You can certainly do much worse than this facility. This place is stronger in some categories than others, but it did not have any poor grades in any of our four major categories. More information about these categories can be found below.

We also found that this facility excelled at short-term care. We gave them an A+ in this category. In computing our short-term care grades, we look at the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This area is more often than not a reliable assessment of the nursing home's rehabilitation services. This facility excelled in the two key staffing areas we looked at. It offered more care from physical therapists and registered nurses than the average nursing home. This is generally an excellent sign. The last statistic we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it performed as well as just about any nursing home in California in this area with 66.8 percent of its residents returning home. At most facilities, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return home.

In addition, this facility also performed well in our inspection category, which is based on the facility's recent inspection reports. In fact, we gave it an A- for that area. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This facility received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This means that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies an imminent risk to resident safety or health. A couple relatively minor deficiencies are not necessarily something to panic about.

Adding to this nursing home's list of strengths, it also received an excellent nursing grade. We awarded them an impressive grade of A- in this category. Our nursing score weighs several datapoints. The most heavily weighted factor is the quantity of hours nurses spend with residents. This nursing home provides 3.9 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is more than what is offered by most places. Lastly, this place was also above average in each of the major quality-based metrics we assessed in this category. It performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

The last area we assessed was long-term care. We awarded this facility a decent grade in that category, with a C. While this wasn't on par with many of its other scores, it is nevertheless not a bad grade. For prospective residents seeking a permanent residence rather than rehabilitation, long-term care grades are a key measure. In addition to providing above average levels of nursing care, this facility gave the pneumonia vaccine to 98.60465 percent of its residents. This figure is higher than many nursing homes. This combination proved to be successful as this nursing home keeps its patients out of the hospital. Although it had 2.21 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, its risk adjusted statistic was better than the majority of nursing homes since it had more complex patients.