Glendale Healthcare Center

The primary reason this nursing home received a decent overall grade is its excellent inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our better grades in that area, with an A-. This is a notably better score than the place's overall grade, which was decent but certainly not elite. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This nursing home received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor dings aren't necessarily something to panic about.

Additionally, we awarded this nursing home a B in our long-term care category. This happens to be one of our more favorable grades. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. 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 much higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it 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 4.1 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.