Country Hills Post Acute: Kitchen Safety Failures - CA
Federal inspectors walked into the kitchen at Country Hills Post Acute on the morning of March 12 and found two kitchen workers in back-to-back hygiene failures within ten minutes of each other. The dishwasher was pulling clean racks from the dishwashing machine with a beard roughly an inch long and no restraint covering it. The beard net, the one he was supposed to be wearing, was looped around his neck. He told inspectors he forgot it was there and acknowledged that hair could fall onto the clean dishes.
Nine minutes later, a different kitchen aide wheeled a trash can outside to the dumpsters. He removed his gloves, washed out the trash can, brought it back inside, walked to the dishwashing area and started handling dishes. He had not washed his hands. He told inspectors he forgot. He said it could cause cross contamination.
Both workers had completed kitchen hygiene training in August 2024.
The facility's own policy, in place since 2001, requires beard restraints whenever staff are cooking, preparing, or handling clean equipment. The same policy requires handwashing any time a worker enters or re-enters the kitchen. The Dietary Manager was standing there for both incidents.
The registered dietician, interviewed later that morning, said the problems ran deeper than what inspectors had already caught. He told them he had conducted a kitchen audit two days earlier, on March 10, and handed over a copy. The audit was two pages with line-by-line inspection areas. Most of them were blank. The dietician had written handwritten notes at the bottom about unlabeled food and meat thawing, but said he had not looked at everything in the kitchen during the audit. He said he should have.
The Director of Nursing said he expected the kitchen to be cleaned daily and kept sanitary at all times. He said he expected a deep cleaning list to exist so staff knew what was required of them. He said everyone should wash their hands when entering the kitchen. He said all of this as a statement of what he expected, not as a description of what was happening.
What was happening, according to inspectors, was a kitchen where the oversight mechanism, the dietician's audit, had been performed incompletely and documented even less completely, where a training completed seven months earlier had not translated into practice, and where the person directly supervising the kitchen watched two hygiene violations occur in the span of a few minutes without intervening before inspectors arrived.
The registered dietician noted that dust on the fire sprinklers above the stove could fall and contaminate food being prepared below. That detail appeared in his interview, not in the incomplete audit he had conducted two days before the inspection.
CMS rated the harm level as minimal, with potential for actual harm, affecting many residents. The residents eating from dishes handled that morning had no way of knowing what had happened before their trays arrived.
The dishwasher knew the beard net was supposed to cover his beard. The kitchen aide knew he was supposed to wash his hands before touching dishes. The dietician knew he was supposed to look at everything in the kitchen during an audit. The Dietary Manager knew his staff were expected to follow hygiene protocols. Everyone knew. The beard net stayed around the dishwasher's neck anyway, and the kitchen aide grabbed the dishes anyway, and the audit form stayed mostly blank anyway.
Full Inspection Report
The details above represent a summary of key findings. View the complete inspection report for Country Hills Post Acute from 2025-03-14 including all violations, facility responses, and corrective action plans.
Additional Resources
Data source: This article is based on inspection data downloaded directly from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) via Medicare.gov. CMS releases inspection reports in bulk; we publish the findings as documented by state surveyors in the official Form CMS-2567 Statement of Deficiencies.
Plan of correction: The CMS report we receive does not include the facility's plan of correction. Facilities submit plans of correction separately to state survey agencies and those responses may not be reflected in CMS data at the time of publication. The absence of a plan of correction in our data does not mean one was not filed. Readers who want information about corrective steps taken are encouraged to contact the facility directly or their state survey agency.
Corrections may have occurred: Inspection reports reflect conditions observed on the date of the survey. Facilities may have implemented corrections, staffing changes, additional training, or other remediation since the report was issued. We report what CMS provides and encourage readers to seek current information from the facility.
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Last verified: November 6, 2026 · Our methodology
COUNTRY HILLS POST ACUTE in EL CAJON, CA was cited for violations during a health inspection on March 14, 2025.
The dishwasher was pulling clean racks from the dishwashing machine with a beard roughly an inch long and no restraint covering it.
Health inspections identify deficiencies that facilities must correct. Violations range from minor documentation issues to serious safety concerns. Review the full report below for specific details and facility response.