Burbank Healthcare & Rehab

We want to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received a much better grade for nursing than it received overall. In fact, it received one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A-. Our nursing grade includes a variety of factors. The most important one is the number of hours nurses spend with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place California in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a system of turning patients even once per day.

This nursing home's second most favorable category is long-term care. We gave it a grade of B- in this area. This is basically a slightly below average score in this category. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. After we finished looking at the volume of nursing care, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination records. We were optimistic to find that this facility vaccinates 99.190285 percent of its patients for pneumonia. This place keeps its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility's third highest category came in the area of short-term care. In that area, we awarded this facility a B-. Short-term care grades are based on the facility's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a vast spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, not to mention other types of therapy. We were surprised to find that this facility was below average in the two key staffing areas we assessed. The facility offered fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. It is important to determine whether this also correlates to a lower quality of care. The last item we considered in this area is the percentage of patients who eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 4.8 percent of this facility's patients returned home. This figure was below the national average.

The final category we looked at was inspections. Unfortunately, this nursing home didn't receive glowing inspections in recent years. As a result, we had to give it an F in this area. Since this data is compiled by independent government inspectors, we tend to heavily weight negative feedback in this category. This really dragged down this facility's overall grade. You should pay close attention to any deficiencies on a nursing home's inspection reports when it receives this poor of an inspection score. We would pay close attention to the severity of the deficiencies. This nursing home was hit with 7 deficiencies by CMS. The only positive thing we can say is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that suggest that they caused a risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility also received 37 substantiated complaints in recent years. This is yet another bad sign.