Parkwest Healthcare Center

Parkwest Healthcare Center is located in Reseda, California. Our scoring system was not favorable to this nursing home, as we gave it an overall grade of F. Reseda received a more impressive city grade of B, so there are far better options in the city worth considering. If you aren't deterred by this facility's report card, you can continue reading to find out about its category scores. Inspection reports are discussed in the next paragraph.

While this nursing home's overall grade was terrible, it performed pretty well in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a B for that area, which is one of our better scores. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection ratings. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite insignificant. While this place had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. A couple minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. In that category, we gave this nursing home an D. There are a number of datapoints included in this area. Most of these criteria relate to levels of nurse staffing. We do not think quantity of care was the reason for this facility's poor nursing score. With 4.6 hours of nursing care per patient per day, this place actually surpassed the national average. Despite performing well in terms of nursing hours, this nursing home was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing ratings. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and found that this nursing home was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, this statistic pulled down this facility's nursing grade substantially.

This facility's second worse score was long-term care, where it earned a grade of just D in that area. This is a relatively poor score. If you are looking for services other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care grades. Once we finished looking at the volume of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination statistics. We were pleased to find that this facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. We were far less impressed with its hospitalization rate. We found that this nursing home had 4.55 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is more than twice the national average. This is definitely a concerning figure.

The next category we looked at is short-term care, which proved to be a weak spot for this nursing home. We awarded this nursing home a grade of D for short-term care. In computing our short-term care scores, we assess a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This grade is often a solid measure of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that just 40.8 percent of this facility's residents returned home.