Buckner Villa Siesta Home

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Our inspection scores are tied to items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this area tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This means CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Compounding its dominant assessments in other areas, we gave this facility a score of A for its long-term care score. When facilities receive a score in this range in this category it generally means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Turning our third area, this nursing home received a top-shelf short-term care grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- in that area. In computing our short-term care grades, we scrutinize the facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This category is generally a fair measure of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final item we looked at in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that 5.4 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

The next area we assessed is nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home an acceptable grade of B-. This ended up being this facility's weakest area. We scrutinized the levels of nurses employed by the nursing home, in addition to the number of hours the nurses spent with patients, in determining our score in this category. This facility provides only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a somewhat uninspiring figure which is well below the national average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility excelled in some of the quality measures we looked at. It scored well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the number of hours of care offered.