Santa Anita Convalescent Hospital

We just couldn't find anything good to say about this place. It received a D in long-term care. For patients looking for a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 99.545456 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is better than most nursing homes. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. Sadly, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

Among this nursing home's several poor grades was its F in the area of nursing care. Nursing scores are mostly based on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing scores. This nursing home performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Unfortunately, this facility received really weak inspection reports in recent years, causing us to give them a lowly F in our inspection category. An F in this category is typically a sign that we found some red flags on the nursing home's government inspections. For nursing homes with poor inspection ratings, you should scrutinize any severe deficiencies found on their recent inspection reports. Tragically, this facility was assessed one category L deficiency. This type of deficiency indicates multiple widespread threats to resident safety or health. This type of deficiency is very damaging to a facility's inspection score. Finally, we want to draw your attention to the fact that this place was assessed significant government fines amounting to more than $100,000. This often means that a facility's poor performance has been an issue for more than one year.

The next area we graded is short-term care. It received an abysmal F in this category, which is an abysmal grade. Short-term care grades are critical for prospective residents looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires more highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a wide spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Considering its abysmal grade in this category, we were not stunned to learn this facility offers significantly fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most nursing homes. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who ultimately were able to return home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 3.8 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.