West Hills Health and Rehabilitation Center

It should also be noted that this nursing home' short-term care grade outpaced its overall grade. We gave it a B+ for short-term care. Short-term care grades are often used to grade a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to have highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final statistic we considered in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that 5.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

We also want to emphasize this facility's nearly flawless health inspections in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of B+ in this area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite insignificant. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

This nursing home also received a strong nursing grade. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B in that category, which is one of our better scores. Our nursing rating analyzes the facility's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of licensure of the nurses and the quantity of hours spent with residents. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving residents at least once a day.

Moving on to the last area, this facility was awarded a respectable long-term care score of C. For prospective residents looking for a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. One of the criteria we considered after nurse's aid hours is vaccines. We were a bit bothered by the fact that this facility administered the pneumonia vaccination to a relatively low 87.915405 percent of its residents. On a more positive note, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.