Griffith Park Healthcare Center

Griffith Park Healthcare Center is in Glendale, California. This nursing home received an overall grade of F. Fortunately, this nursing home is one of 14 nursing homes in this city so if you aren't impressed, you should have better options. More information on this facility's category grades may be found below. Its best category is nursing, which is discussed in the next paragraph.

Even though we gave this nursing home a terrible overall grade, we gave it a B- for our nursing rating. We weighed the qualifications of nurses working for the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of hours those nurses spent with patients, in computing our rating in this area. Based on the CMS data, this nursing home offers 3.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based measures, such as minimizing major falls. This facility performed admirably in this subcategory. Avoiding major falls is often a good indicator that a facility has quality controls in place. Some falls can be avoided if a facility provides enough nurses aids to assist its residents.

Surprisingly, we awarded this facility a C for our long-term care score, which isn't a bad grade. Our long-term care ratings are based on a nursing home's quantity of care. This means a vast spectrum of personal care services, ranging from help with activities of daily living to routine healthcare services. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is more than the average nursing home. The last datapoint we looked at is its hospitalization rate. Here we found that this facility had 5.26 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Although this figure is quite a bit higher than the national average, this number may be skewed for some nursing homes due to the preexisting medical conditions of residents.

This nursing home didn't perform horribly in inspections. In fact, we gave it a C for that area. Other categories turned out to be the source of this nursing home's bottom of the barrel overall score. We would argue that one of the most important factors in evaluating an inspection report is deficiencies. In this regard, we especially look at the severity of those deficiencies. This place was assessed 14 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to find that none were in categories G through L. This means that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies to be an imminent danger to resident safety or health. Unfortunately, we also need to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received some government fines in recent years.

The last category we looked at is short-term care. This facility received a bottom of the barrel grade of F in that category. In the category of short-term care, we try to evaluate measures of a facility's rehabilitation services. We assess a facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents who who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 33.9 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.