Maple Healthcare Center

Maple Healthcare Center is located in Los Angeles, California, which features quite a few nursing homes. We awarded it an overall grade of B-, which is a middle of the road score. In a city without an elite selection of nursing homes, this facility turned out to be better than most of the alternatives in Los Angeles. One of the better aspects of this facility's report card is its strong inspection rating, which is addressed in the next section.

While this facility's overall grade was not bad, it really fared well in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our best scores. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an A-. Our nursing grade looks at the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We consider both the levels of training of those nurses as well as the amount of time spent with residents. This particular nursing home provided 3.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed 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 California 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 policy of turning a patient at least once a day.

The third category we assessed is long-term care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of B. It actually performed better than most facilities in this area. When facilities receive this kind of grade in long-term care it is typically a good sign for patient care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses aids. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. Finally, we looked at its number of hospitalizations. With 1.9 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this place is just about middle of the road in this area.

The last area we analyzed is short-term care, is this nursing home's weakest category. We awarded this facility a D in this area. This really was one of the few weak links on a quality report card. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to gauge a facility's rehabilitation services. To offer highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally must feature higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. It looks like this place was subpar in two of the key staffing areas we assessed. In fact, it supplied fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most facilities. The final statistic we assessed in this category is the number of patients who eventually returned home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 18.1 percent of its residents returning home. This was quite a bit below average.