Mission Hills Post Acute Care

This nursing home really excelled in our short-term care category. We gave it an A- for that category, which is one of our highest grades. This really boosted its profile. Short-term care grades are commonly used to measure a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To have quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents that ultimately were able to return home from this facility. We found that 6.1 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

In addition, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an B+. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection ratings. One of those factors is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively minor. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home in any area came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of B-. In determining a nursing home's nursing score, we assess the quantity of hours nurses are with patients and the level of skill of the nurses. This nursing home averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, which is a very low figure. Finally, nursing grades also consider quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this place actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is typically an indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place. Many falls could be avoided if a nursing home provides enough nurses aids to assist its patients.

This nursing home's worst category was long-term care, which is the last area we looked at. We gave it an abysmal F in this area. In spite of a few acceptable scores in other areas, this score is still disappointing so we wanted to point it out. For prospective residents looking for a permanent place to live rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Thankfully, this nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is an above average statistic. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home had less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.