Gardena Convalescent Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ long-term care grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Facilities that receive this type of grade in this category tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure residents are kept in good health. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly can be a dangerous illness for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home does not leave its residents vulnerable. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Turning to another one of this place's strengths, it also received a very impressive inspection score. Inspections proved to be one of its best category grades. In that area, we gave this facility an A-. These inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This facility received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to be an immediate risk to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility received a very good nursing grade this year as well. It received one of our better scores in that category with a grade of B+. Our nursing rating analyzes the facility's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of licensure of the nurses and the amount of time spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures 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 California in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of turning patients at least once a day.

The last area we scored is short-term care. This nursing home was given a strong short-term care rating in our assessment, with a grade of C. Even though this isn't as dominant as many of its other grades, this remains an acceptable grade for this category. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to measure a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. We were not able to track down information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. The last item we considered in this category is the number of patients that were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 4.7 percent of this facility's patients returned home.