Sherman Oaks Hospital Sub-Acute Nursing Care Center

We also want to point out that this nursing home earned an impressive grade of A for its nursing grade. In calculating a nursing home's nursing rating, we assess the amount of time nurses commit to residents and the level of skill of the nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.9 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Contributing to its first-rate assessment, this nursing home also was awarded an excellent long-term care score, with a grade of A. Nursing homes that do well in this category tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is significantly higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home also earned a nearly flawless government inspection report. It received one of our best grades in that category with an A-. Inspection scores account for a host of factors included in a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher scores in this area tend to have very few severe deficiencies. While this facility had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Moving on to our next area, this facility was given a high-end short-term care rating. We gave it a grade of B+ in that category, completing one of our more favorable report cards. In determining our short-term care scores, we scrutinize a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other types of therapists. This grade is more often than not a useful measure of a facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.