Oakpark Healthcare Center

With an address in Tujunga, California, Oakpark Healthcare Center is one of just a couple available nursing homes in the city. This is a well below average facility, with an overall grade of D. This wasn't the worse nursing home we looked at, but we'd still struggle to recommend it. Despite all this, one of the few highlights of this nursing home's report card is its strong inspection rating. You can scroll down to find out about inspections and other category grades

Although we didn't grade this facility favorably overall, we did give it an excellent score in the category of inspections, where it earned an A. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being quite insignificant. This place was assessed 10 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of these deficiencies an immediate risk to resident health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

This facility received its next most favorable category grade in the category of short-term care. We awarded this facility a grade of C in this category, which is an acceptable grade. In crafting our short-term care scores, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our purpose is to devise a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. This nursing home employs both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities employ these skilled professionals. The final item we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. It was respectable in this metric with 45.8 percent of its residents returning home.

Sadly, this nursing home's third highest category was long-term care. As it turns out, with a grade of D in this area, it still fared relatively poorly. For patients seeking a permanent place to live rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. On top of considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 97.72727 percent of its patients. We were far less impressed with its hospitalization rate. Here we found that this nursing home had 4.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is more than twice the national average. This is certainly a concerning figure.

The final category we analyzed was nursing. Sadly, it received an F for this area, which is an abysmal score. There are a variety of data points within this category. Most of these criteria reflect levels of nurse staffing. Quantity of nursing care does not appear to be the source of this facility's poor nursing grade. This facility provides 4.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is above average. In determining our grades, we apply additional weight to hours performed by highly skilled nurses such as registered nurses. Despite being above average in terms of nursing hours, this nursing home had abysmal scores in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing scores. For starters, we looked at the percent of patients sustaining pressure ulcers. This place was at more than double the national average in this statistic. This is quite alarming when you consider that many bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the facility's fate of receiving a very poor nursing grade.