Griffith Park Healthcare Center

Although we were not complementary of this facility's overall grade, it actually earned an impressive nursing grade this year. We gave it a B in this area. The nursing rating consists of quite a few components, but the primary one is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures 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 generally be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a policy of moving a resident more frequently.

Another one of this nursing home's more favorable category scores was in the area of long-term care. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B. Nursing homes that excel in this category typically provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. After considering the amount of nursing care, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia can be a life or death ailment for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility doesn't leave this to chance. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

As it turns out, this nursing home only received a grade of D for its short-term care rating, which is not one of our better scores. Our short-term care grades are arguably more critical for those requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation usually mandates higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes not merely nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. With a grade of this caliber in this category, we were not stunned to discover this facility was well below average in several staffing figures we focus on. The facility provided significantly fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most facilities. The last metric we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.1 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics sunk this nursing home's short-term care score.

Moving on our last category of inspections, this nursing home received a grade that's as bad as it gets. You should pay special attention to any deficiencies on a facility's inspection reports when it receives this poor of an inspection score. We would pay close attention to the level of severity of those deficiencies. This nursing home had 14 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only positive thing we found is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that suggest they created a threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility also received 8 substantiated complaints in recent years. This is yet another bad sign.