Mesa Manor Center

While we graded this facility incredibly poorly overall, it received a fairly respectable nursing grade this year. We gave it a grade of B- in that category. We looked at the skill-level of nurses employed by the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of hours the nurses were with residents, in determining our score in this area. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this facility performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is often a reliable indicator that a nursing home has sufficient quality controls in place.

As it turns out, its government inspection reports were not the source of this nursing home's bottom of the barrel overall grade. In fact, it earned a grade of C in this category. We believe that one of the most important factors in assessing an inspection report is deficiencies. We especially focus on the severity of the deficiencies. This nursing home was assessed 4 deficiencies on its government inspection report, but we were relieved to find that none were category G through L deficiencies. This means it dodged the more serious categories of deficiencies. Lastly, this nursing home was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. This is generally a really bad sign. We would never recommend this facility.

Unfortunately, this nursing home's next highest category was short-term care. As it turns out, with a D in this area, it still fared relatively badly. Short-term care grades are based on the facility's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a vast scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. Not surprisingly, we found that this facility offers far less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the average nursing home. The final metric we looked at in this category is the number of residents who who were able to eventually return home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 3.8 percent of its residents returning home. This was quite a bit below the national average.

The next area we assessed was long-term care, in which this facility received a rock bottom score in this category as well. It received a lowly F for this category, which is obviously very concerning. Nursing homes that receive this kind of score in long-term care may not provide the kind of consistent around the clock care that some other facilities offer. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours was vaccinations. Frankly, we were a bit worried that this facility administered the pneumonia vaccination to a relatively low 80 percent of its patients. Surprisingly, this place was actually decent at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.