Pasadena Meadows Nursing Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ long-term care grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Nursing homes that excel in this category typically provide patients with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is far higher than most nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. Nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this nursing home an A-. The nursing grade includes many datapoints, however, the paramount consideration is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility provided 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 place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

In addition, this nursing home also received excellent inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our best scores in that area, with an A-. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This tells you CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In the last category we looked at, this facility was awarded a very favorable grade of A- in our short-term care category. With this grade, the nursing home rounded out a straight A profile. Our short-term care grade is often employed to measure a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To provide good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide higher levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. Unfortunately, we weren't able to find information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. The final datapoint we assessed in this area is the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that 5.8 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.