Bella Vista Health Center

In addition to being a quality nursing home overall, this facility really excelled in nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few facilities performed better in this area. Nursing grades are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility California in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of turning patients even once per day.

This nursing home was awarded impressive marks in the category of short-term care as well. Consequently, we awarded it one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A-. In the area of short-term care, we seek to assess indicators of a facility's rehabilitation. We analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and various therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last item we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that 5.2 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Turning to another of this nursing home's strengths, it also received a very impressive inspection rating. In fact, inspections proved to be one of its best grades. In that category, we gave this facility an impressive grade of B+. Inspection ratings are tied to several pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this area have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This place received 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies to pose an immediate threat to resident safety or health. A couple relatively minor dings are not necessarily the end of the world.

The last category we graded is long-term care, in which this facility received a B. This nursing home ended up being very solid across the board. Facilities that excel in this category tend to provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is too frequently a dangerous ailment for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home does not take any chances. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.