Brookdale Northridge

To pair with its strong overall score, we awarded this facility an A for short-term care. In computing these short-term care grades, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our objective is to create a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 6.5 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

We also want to emphasize this nursing home's nearly flawless health inspections in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of B+ in this category. Arguably the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This tells you the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of B-. While this didn't quite match its scores in some of the categories discussed above, this is still a decent score. Our nursing grade is based on many datapoints, most of which are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.5 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This figure is far below the national average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place surprisingly excelled in some of the quality measures we looked at. It scored well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the number of hours of care offered.

The next category we rated was long-term care, is this nursing home's worst category. We gave this nursing home a D in that category. This really was one of just a couple of dings on a quality report card. In a long-term care environment, the facility's 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 patients. After considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is better than the average nursing home. To our surprise, this facility also keeps its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.