Providence Little Company of Mary Medical Center Torrance Transitional Care Center

In addition to earning a great overall grade, this nursing home also received an A+ in short-term care. In calculating our short-term care grades, we look at a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This area is frequently a fair assessment of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. We were pleased to find that this nursing home employs both registered nurses and physical therapists. The same can't be said for all nursing homes. The last item we looked at in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 7 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

This facility has received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. Our inspection scores account for a host of factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category typically have few of these severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that CMS didn't consider 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.

This nursing home also received a impressive long-term care score. This actually ended up being its third best category grade. In that category, we awarded this facility a score of A. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. One of the criteria we considered after nursing hours was vaccinations. It does not appear that this nursing home submitted data regarding vaccinations. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In our last category, this facility also received an impressive nursing score, with an A. This rounded out a very favorable profile. Our nursing score assesses quite a few factors, but the paramount one is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these statistics as reliable measures of the caliber of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.