Chatsworth Park Care Center

Chatsworth Park Care Center is a large nursing home in Chatsworth, California. This nursing home turns out to be a very respectable facility, with an overall grade of B. Based on our assessment, this nursing home ought to meet the needs of most people. More information on this facility's category grades is available below. Its best category was short-term care, which is discussed in the next section.

This facility received a strong overall score as described above, but we especially wanted to note its excellent short-term care grade. We gave them an A in this category. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The goal is to create a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. One reason for this facility's strong score in this category is that it provides a substantially greater volume of physical therapist hours to its residents than the average nursing home. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients that eventually returned home from this facility. On top of excelling in the area of physical therapy hours, we found that it performed as well as just about any facility in the country with 66.7 percent of its patients returning home.

This nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections. We gave it a grade of A- for that area, which is one of our highest grades. This is one of the few nursing homes with an overall grade in this range which earned multiple category grades this high. Inspection grades weigh several factors included in a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher scores in this category generally have few severe deficiencies. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple relatively minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-. This facility didn't perform quite as well in this category as it did in some other categories. Nevertheless, this is still a respectable score. The nursing score weighs many factors, however, the most important consideration is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. With 4.2 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis, this place surpassed the majority of nursing homes. Lastly, we also factored some quality-based metrics into our nursing grades. Specifically, we looked at the percent of residents who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these areas as reliable measures of the quality of nursing care, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

Our next area is long-term care, where we gave this nursing home a grade of C in this area. For prospective residents looking for a permanent place to live as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. In addition to impressive nursing hour statistics, this facility's vaccination records are better than most nursing homes also. In fact, it vaccinated 98.09524 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Finally, we looked at its number of hospitalizations. We found that this facility had 2.97 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. While this figure is quite a bit higher than the national average, this statistic may be skewed for some facilities due to the preexisting medical conditions of patients.