Ambassador, a Villa Center

Although we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a B- for our inspections rating. In fact, the facility received very impressive inspection report this year. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are quite minor. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. This proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an D. Nursing scores are primarily tied to a facility's level of nurse staffing. This place averaged just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is not a very impressive figure. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. This facility fared well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these datapoints to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This nursing home ended up receiving a rock-bottom score in our long-term care area. It received a lowly F in this area. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it typically means the facility did not perform well in our measures relating to resident care. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We found that this facility provided the vaccine to a relatively low 86.391754 percent of its residents, which is not a very encouraging sign. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. This is its best feature in this category.

The last area we scored is short-term care. It received an abysmal F in this category, which is a bottom of the barrel score. In forming our short-term care ratings, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to devise a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients that ultimately returned home from this nursing home. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.6 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.