Bel Air at Teravista

In addition to being a quality facility overall, this facility really excelled at short-term care, where it earned an A-. Short-term care grades are generally employed to score a facility's rehabilitation services. To provide highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must offer better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Unfortunately, it does not appear that this nursing home submitted registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. The last statistic we assessed in this area is the number of patients that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that 6.2 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

This nursing home also performed well in our inspection category, which is based on its inspections. We awarded it an A- for that area. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be quite insignificant. 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.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of B-. This wasn't quite as good as some of its other scores, but a grade in this range is not the end of the world. There are several subcategories within this grade. Most of these criteria reflect staffing levels. This place provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is a relatively low total compared with most nursing homes. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics. Although this place got dinged a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in a few of these quality-based measures. With less than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it fared well in this area. This can be an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving a resident more often.

Moving on to our last area, this facility was given an acceptable long-term care score of C. Our long-term care grade is typically used to score a nursing home's performance as a traditional convalescent home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services provided by a skilled nursing facility. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is better than most nursing homes. This place keeps its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.