PIH Health Whittier Hospital

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ short-term care grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. In crafting these short-term care ratings, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to create a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last item we assessed in this category is the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 7 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

We also awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. The nursing category assesses quite a few components, many of which are tied to nursing hours. This nursing home averages 1 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This nursing home also was dominant in the category of long-term care, where we gave it a grade of A. Only a select group of nursing homes performed better in this area. For prospective patients in need of a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination records. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this nursing home submitted vaccination data. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Turning to our inspection category, this facility excelled in that area, which is based on the nursing home's recent government inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A for that category. This wrapped up this place's straight A report card. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection scores. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some can be relatively insignificant. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This means that the inspectors did not 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.