Granada Hills Convalescent

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Our inspection scores are tied to several datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this category have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

This nursing home really excelled in the area of short-term care, where we awarded it a score of A-. Not many facilities performed better in this area. Short-term care grades are often used to measure a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to have quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 5.7 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. Our nursing grade is based on many subcategories. The most heavily weighted one is the amount of time nurses spent with residents. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can typically be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The last area we analyzed is long-term care. This facility was awarded an impressive long-term care score this year, with a B-. Although this wasn't nearly as elite as a few of its other grades, this remains a respectable grade for that category. Our long-term care scores are critical for patients requiring non-healthcare services such as personal care. On top of considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. This place also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.