Bel Air at Teravista

One of the reasons this ended up being a great nursing home is it earned an A+ in our inspections category. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

This facility is also strong in the area of short-term care, where it was awarded a grade of B+. It outperformed most facilities in this category. Our short-term care ratings are arguably most important for people requiring rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Unfortunately, we weren't able to track down registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this facility. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Additionally, this nursing home also received favorable long-term care scores in our assessment. Indeed, we gave it one of our stronger grades in that area, with a score of B+. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is much higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The last category we rated is nursing, proved to be this nursing home's weakest category. We gave this nursing home a grade of D in this area. This really is one of just a couple of dings on a quality report card. Nursing grades are based in large part on levels of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. This nursing home performed well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good measures of the quality of nursing care.