Lomita Post-Acute Care Center

In addition to being a quality facility overall, this nursing home really excelled in our short-term care rating, where it earned an impressive grade of A. In determining our short-term care grades, we look at a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This rating is often a reliable measure of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last item we looked at in this category is the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that 6.2 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

In addition, this facility also excelled in inspections, where it earned a grade of A-. Our inspection ratings are tied to pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent government inspections. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this category tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

This facility received even higher grades in the area of nursing. In fact, it received one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A-. When determining a nursing home's nursing grade, we look at the quantity of hours nurses are caring for patients as well as the level of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home averages 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a system of turning a patient more often.

The next area we assessed was long-term care. This facility was given an above average long-term care grade this year, with a grade of C. While this isn't quite as good as several of its other category grades, this is still an acceptable score in this category. In the category of long-term care, we look at the quantity of services offered by a nursing home, as opposed to more sophisticated services. One of the statistics we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccinations. Thankfully, this facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its residents. This place keeps its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.