Palos Verdes Health Care Center

While we gave this facility a terrible overall score, we awarded it a B- for short-term care. Our short-term care grade is typically employed to judge a facility's rehabilitation services. To have quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have better levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than the typical facility. The hope is that this does not adversely affect the quality of care. The last metric we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

We were also surprised to find that this facility received a decent nursing grade this year. We gave it a grade of C in that category. Nursing scores are primarily associated with a facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics. While this nursing home got dinged a bit for nursing hours, it excelled in some of these quality-based metrics. With fewer than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it fared well in this area. This is typically an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of turning residents at least once a day.

Moving on to the category of long-term care, this facility was awarded just a D in that area. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary goal is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Thankfully, this facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is an above average percentage. Surprisingly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than many nursing homes. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

Turning our last category of inspections, this facility received a terrible score. We weight this grade more heavily than other categories. We would advise paying special attention to any deficiencies on a facility's inspection reports when it receives this bad of an inspection rating. We suggest you scrutinize the level of severity of those deficiencies. This facility was hit with 6 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only favorable thing we found is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that indicate that they created a threat to patient safety or health. Lastly, we would like to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home received significant government fines in recent years amounting to over $100,000. This typically indicates that a nursing home's poor track record has been an issue for more than one year.