Focused Care at Pasadena

While we graded this facility incredibly poorly overall, it received a fairly respectable inspection report this year. As a result, it received a decent grade in that category with a score of C. Inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This place was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to find that none were category J through L deficiencies. This means the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to place resident safety or health in immediate harm or jeopardy. Unfortunately, we also need to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received significant government fines in recent years.

This nursing home's second best category was long-term care, but even there it received a grade of just D in that area. This ended up being a relatively poor grade. For patients in need of a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. After assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 99.3311 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is higher than most nursing homes. To our surprise, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Sadly, a few of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.

This nursing home ended up receiving a bottom of the barrel grade in our short-term care category. It received a lowly F in this area. In the area of short-term care, we attempt to evaluate indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. As you might expect, we found that this place provides significantly less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than a typical facility. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. This definitely was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 4.8 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, about half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.

Moving on to the last area, this facility really didn't fare very well in this area either. With an abysmal grade of F in nursing, this is about as bad as it gets. The nursing rating includes quite a few subcategories, most of which are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This facility averaged a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. In addition to receiving below average marks for nursing hours, this facility was less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing grades. We looked at the percentage of residents suffering pressure ulcers and found that this place was at approximately 1.5 times the national average in this metric. This is a bad sign when you consider that many pressure ulcers are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. This statistic dragged down this nursing home's nursing score significantly.