Buena Vida Continuing Care & Rehab Center

To pair with its decent overall grade, we awarded this nursing home an A for its inspection grade. This is far better than the facility's overall score. Arguably the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher grades in this area typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones 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 shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This nursing home also was given a favorable score in our long-term care category. We awarded this nursing home an above average grade of B in that area. For prospective patients in need of a permanent place to live rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are a key measure. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 79.88304 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is a few points below what we anticipated but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we like to see, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Another strength of this nursing home is its favorable grade in nursing. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with an D. There are a variety of criteria within this area. Many of the criteria are tied to the quantity of nurse staffing. This nursing home provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This number is quite a bit below the national average. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing ratings. This facility performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these statistics to be good measures of the quality of nursing care.

The next area we assessed is short-term care, which turned out to be this nursing home's weakest category. It received a lowly F for this area, which is obviously a major concern. In determining our short-term care scores, we size up the facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This area is often a meaningful assessment of a facility's rehabilitation services. With its grade in this area, we weren't stunned to find that this place was well below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its patients based on the metrics we assessed. Frankly, this was what we expected here. The final datapoint we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 3.7 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics sunk this facility's short-term care score.