Buena Vista Care Center

Buena Vista Care Center is a nursing home in Santa Barbara, California, which has 132,916 people. This nursing home is a relatively poor nursing home. A grade in this range suggests we found some red flags. In our view, we'd struggle to recommend this facility. More information on this facility's category grades may be found below. Its best category was inspections, which is discussed in the next paragraph.

Although we did not rate this nursing home well overall, we want to point out its decent inspections in recent years. We gave it a somewhat respectable grade of B- in this area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection scores. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be relatively minor. This facility was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This indicates that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies to cause an immediate risk to resident health or safety. Lastly, this facility was flagged by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. We prefer to avoid facilities with this designation. Please do your best to find an alternative nursing home.

We also ended up giving this facility a fairly respectable grade in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of B-. There are several subcategories within this area. Many of the criteria reflect nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 3.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also considered quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing grades. This place was above average in many of the major statistics we focus on, including minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

This nursing home's third best category was its short-term care score, where it was awarded a B-. In the area of short-term care, we seek to evaluate measures of a facility's rehabilitation. We look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the typical facility. The hope is always that this does not adversely affect the quality of care. The final statistic we considered in this category is the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from the facility. We found that it performed much better in this metric with 63.7 percent of its patients returning home. With most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return home.

The final area we scored was long-term care. We gave this nursing home a grade of B- in this category. Our long-term care grade is commonly used to score a nursing home's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services provided by a skilled nursing facility. After we finished looking at the amount of nursing care, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. We were optimistic to discover that this nursing home vaccinates 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 1.17 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home has less hospitalizations than many nursing homes.