Garden Grove Convalescent Hospital

This nursing home received a strong overall score as described above, but we especially would like to emphasize its excellent health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with better scores in this category most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

This facility received high grades in the area of nursing as well. In fact, it received one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A-. Nursing grades are primarily associated with a facility's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a policy of turning residents more frequently.

Turning to our next category, this nursing home also received a grade of B+ for its long-term care rating. This is an above average score in this category. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. After considering the quantity of nursing care, we then looked at the facility's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly is often a life or death health condition for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a facility does not take any chances. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The next area we analyzed was short-term care. We gave this facility an acceptable score in this category, with a C. While this is not as strong as a few of this nursing home's other scores, it is nevertheless not the end of the world. Our short-term care ratings are based on the nursing home's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a vast spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other types of therapy. We weren't able to locate information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. Finally, we considered the number of patients who ultimately returned home from this nursing home. We found that 4.6 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was actually quite a bit below average.