PIH Health Whittier Hospital

One of the reasons this place received a great overall grade is that it earned an A+ in short-term care. Our short-term care ratings are based in part on a facility's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a vast spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 7 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

This first-rate facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Our nursing rating assesses a handful of subcategories, however, the paramount one is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home averages 1 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility 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.

The third area we looked at was long-term care. Contributing to its elite profile, this facility also performed well in that category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of of A in that area. For prospective residents seeking a permanent place to live as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Unfortunately, we weren't able to locate this place's vaccination data. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Finishing off this facility's impressive profile, we awarded this nursing home an impressive grade of A for our inspections rating. With this score, the nursing home completes its straight A report card. Arguably the most significant factor we consider in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with better scores in this category typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This nursing home was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This means that the inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to be an immediate risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.