Northridge Health Center

To pair with its relatively modest overall grade, we gave this facility an A for our inspections rating. This score is far more impressive than the facility's overall rating. Inspection grades are tied to many items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this area have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. 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. Based on this, we still had favorable view of this nursing home's inspections.

In addition, we also would like to note that this facility was given strong short-term care marks in this assessment. We awarded them one of our more impressive scores in this area, with a B. This proved to be the facility's second highest score. In computing our short-term care grades, we look at a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This category is generally a meaningful measure of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. Unfortunately, we weren't able to track down information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents that returned home from this nursing home. We found that 6.3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

We also gave this facility a middle of the pack score in the category of long-term care, where we gave it a grade of C. For long-term care residents, the nursing home's primary objective is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. After considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination records. We were pleased to discover that this nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. This place keeps its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The next category we scored is nursing, which turned out to be this nursing home's weakest category. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F in this category, which is certainly a major concern. The nursing score weighs several factors, many of which are associated with levels of nurse staffing. This place averaged a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This figure is far below average. To go along with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this place also didn't perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing ratings. We looked at the percent of residents experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This nursing home had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average nursing home. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, these metrics hurt this facility's nursing grade significantly.