Greater El Monte Community Hospital

In addition to receiving a strong overall grade, this nursing home also earned excellent health inspections in recent years. We gave it one of our highest scores in that area, with a grade of A. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection ratings. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are relatively minor. While this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A- in our nursing category. Our nursing score is mostly tied to the facility's nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.9 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place California in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as having a system of turning patients at least once a day.

We also would like to note the fact that this nursing home was awarded a strong grade of A- in our long-term care area. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. One of the datapoints we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccines. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. This is a proven method to minimize unnecessary hospitalizations for the aged 65 and up population. Lastly, 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 a remarkably low number.

The fourth category we rated is short-term care, where this nursing home was given a B+. This completed a very strong profile. Few facilities earned a B+ or better in every category. In determining our short-term care ratings, we size up a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other types of therapists. This rating is considered to be a useful measure of a nursing home's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents that were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.