Griffith Park Healthcare Center

Although we were not complementary of this nursing home's overall grade, it received an impressive nursing score this year. We gave it a grade of B in this category. We scrutinized the levels of nurses working for the facility, as well as the number of hours the nurses spent with residents, in computing our score in this area. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this place 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 offering better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving a resident even once per day.

Additionally, we also would like to point out that this nursing home received positive long-term care marks this year. We gave them one of our higher scores in that area, with a grade of B. This proved to be the nursing home's second best grade. Nursing homes that excel in this category tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. One of the factors we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours was vaccinations. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a great way to minimize unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the nursing home population. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home's second least favorable score is short-term care, where it earned just a D in that area. This is a relatively poor score. In the category of short-term care, we strive to evaluate measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. With its score in this area, we weren't surprised to learn that this facility was well below average in terms of the number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the measures we looked at. Honestly, this was what we expected here. Finally, we looked at the number of residents that were able to return home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.1 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

Turning to our final category of inspections, this facility received a grade that's as bad as it gets. We weight this category more heavily than our other categories. With nursing homes that received this bad of an inspection score, we would scrutinize any severe deficiencies on its inspection report. This particular nursing home was hit with 14 deficiencies by CMS. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that indicate that they posed a risk to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility also received 7 substantiated complaints in recent years. This is yet another bad sign.