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 7.3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

This facility has also 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 very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. We assessed the levels of nurses employed by the facility, as well as the quantity of hours those nurses spent with residents, in calculating our grade in this area. This nursing home provides 0.8 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 facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

In the last category we graded, this facility was given an impressive grade grade of A in our long-term care category. With this grade, the nursing home finished off a straight A profile. If you are looking for anything other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at long-term care scores. One of the data points we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccines. Unfortunately, it does not look like this nursing home submitted vaccination data. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.