Rinaldi Convalescent Hospital

With an address in Granada Hills, California, Rinaldi Convalescent Hospital is one of four available nursing homes in this area. Featuring an overall grade of D, this is a subpar nursing home. Granada Hills received a city grade of B-, so there are other options in the city worth considering. More information on this nursing home's category grades may be found below. Its best category is short-term care, which is discussed in the next paragraph.

While we were not complementary of this nursing home's overall grade, it received an impressive short-term care rating this year. We gave it a grade of B+ in this area, which proved to be a rare glimmer of hope in its profile. Our short-term care grades are likely most important for people needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally requires more skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not only nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. One of this nursing home's strengths is physical therapy hours. We found that it offers at least 50% more hours with physical therapists to its residents than most other facilities. The final metric we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it performed as well as just about any facility in California in this area with 57.8 percent of its patients returning home.

Remarkably, this facility actually received a good score in inspections as well. We gave it a B for that category, which is one of our better grades. Not many facilities that were this poor overall received multiple category grades of this caliber. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. It is generally best to avoid places that had too many deficiencies. While this place had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

We gave this facility a grade of just D for our nursing rating. Nursing scores are based in large part on quality and quantity of nursing care. This nursing home averages 3.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day, which is below the national average. In addition to receiving below average marks for total nursing hours, this place was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in calculating our nursing scores. We looked at the percentage of patients experiencing pressure ulcers and found that this place was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is a bad sign when you consider that so many pressure ulcers are preventable with better nursing care. This statistic pulled down this facility's nursing score significantly.

The next category we looked at is long-term care, proved to be this nursing home's weakest area. We gave this facility a D in that area. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 1.58 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Sadly, a few of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.