Northridge Village

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our nursing rating. Our nursing grade includes a handful of subcategories, however, the most important consideration is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Among its many high-end scores, this facility was given a top-shelf short-term care score. In fact, it received a grade of A in this category. In determining our short-term care ratings, we assess the facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This category is more often than not a useful assessment of a facility's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 5.2 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

Adding to this facility's impressive resume, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our inspections rating. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively insignificant. While this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This means that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

The last category we rated is long-term care. This facility was awarded an above average nursing grade this year, with a B. Although this is not nearly as elite as some of its other category grades, this is still one of our more favorable grades in this category. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccines. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a proven method to minimize unnecessary hospitalizations for the elderly population. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.