The Californian-Pasadena

The primary reason this ended up being a decent nursing home is that it received an elite inspection grade. Its inspection score was far superior to its overall score. In the inspections category, we gave it an A-. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

In addition, we awarded this nursing home a B+ in our short-term care category. This is one of our more impressive scores. In the category of short-term care, we try to assess measures of a facility's rehabilitation services. We analyze a facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and various therapists. Unfortunately, we were not able to find information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The last measure we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that 5.5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

We also gave this nursing home a decent score in the category of nursing care, with a grade of B-. When calculating our nursing ratings, we factor in both nursing hours and the levels of licensure of the nurses. This facility provides 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures. Although this nursing home got dinged a bit for nursing hours per resident, it excelled in some of these quality-based measures. With fewer than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it did remarkably well in this metric. This is often an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a policy of turning a patient at least once a day.

The next category we graded was long-term care. We awarded this nursing home a D in long-term care, rendering this the nursing home's worst area. For long-term care residents, the primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 97.72727 percent of its patients, which is better than the majority of nursing homes. To our surprise, this place also keeps its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.