Lake Balboa Care Center

To go along with its strong overall score, we gave this facility an impressive grade of A for our short-term care grade. Our short-term care grades are meaningful for residents in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically mandates higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a wide spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we assessed in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 5.5 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

This facility also excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A for that area, which is one of our highest scores. This is one of the few facilities with an overall score in this range which earned multiple category grades this high. These inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

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+. The nursing grade includes quite a few datapoints, many of which are based on nursing hours. 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 nursing home the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a policy of turning a patient even once per day.

Moving on to our fourth area, we awarded this nursing home a D for the area of long-term care. This is the facility's worst category rating. Nevertheless, we would not over-emphasize a single bad score. Nursing homes that do not fare well in this category typically are not as well-staffed and are lagging in some of the areas of routine medical care we assessed. One of the factors we considered after nurse's aid hours was vaccines. Unfortunately, it does not look like this nursing home submitted data regarding vaccinations. To our surprise, this place was actually decent at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best score in this category.