Bel Vista Healthcare Center

In addition to having a decent overall score, we also wanted to point out that this nursing home earned favorable health inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our better grades in this category, with a B+. This is a much better grade than the nursing home's overall grade. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection grades. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively insignificant. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple of minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

This facility also received a positive score in our short-term care category. We awarded this facility a better than average grade of B+ in this area. In the category of short-term care, we seek to qualify measures of a facility's rehabilitation. We look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. We analyzed the skill-level of nurses at the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of hours those nurses were with patients, in computing our score in this category. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Finally, despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this facility actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is generally a good indicator that a facility has quality controls in place.

The next area we analyzed is long-term care. Sadly, it received a lowly F for this area, which is a very poor grade. This is obviously a major concern. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. Once we concluded our assessment of the quantity of nursing care, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination data. We were optimistic to discover that this nursing home vaccinates 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. To our surprise, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.