Park Anaheim Healthcare Center

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this facility really excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with better scores in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This place was hit with 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to be an immediate risk to patient safety or health. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

This nursing home also received a favorable grade in our long-term care category. We awarded this nursing home a better than average grade of B+ in this category. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it typically means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. After assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

We awarded this facility a grade of just D for our short-term care grade. This is not a score to write home about. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to score a nursing home's rehabilitation services In order to offer highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide better levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Not surprisingly, we learned that this facility provides far less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than a typical nursing home. The final metric we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics doomed this facility's short-term care grade.

The final category we rated is nursing, which is a weak link for this nursing home. We gave this facility a grade of just D in our nursing category. We looked at the skill-level of nurses employed by the facility, in addition to the quantity of hours those nurses were with patients, in calculating our score in this area. This facility provided just 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This figure is significantly below the national average. Unfortunately, this place also had abysmal scores in some of the quality-based measures to go along with its weak nursing hour totals. For starters, we looked at the percentage of patients experiencing pressure ulcers. This nursing home was at more than twice the national average in this datapoint.