Glendale Healthcare Center

We want to point out that this facility really outperformed its overall grade in the area of inspections. In fact, it received an excellent government inspection report this year. As a result, we gave it one of our highest grades in this category with an A-. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are quite insignificant. This nursing home was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of these deficiencies to cause an immediate threat to patient health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

This nursing home's next most favorable area is long-term care. We awarded it a B- in this area. This is basically a slightly below average score in this category. Our long-term care grades are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of care. This means a vast range of personal care services, ranging from assistance with activities of daily living to routine medical services. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is better than the vast majority of nursing homes. This place was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B-. We assessed the levels of nurses working for the facility, in addition to the number of hours those nurses spent with residents, in calculating our rating in this area. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, our nursing grades also consider quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this facility performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is usually an indicator that a facility has quality controls in place. Many falls could be avoided if a facility supplies enough nurses aids to assist its patients.

The final category we rated was short-term care, is this nursing home's weakest area. We awarded this nursing home a D in this category. This really was one of the couple of dings on a very solid profile. Short-term care grades are often used to grade a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to offer good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to have higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents that ultimately returned home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 3.4 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.