Buena Vista Healthcare

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Our inspection scores are tied to many items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this area typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

We also would like to point out the fact that this facility was given a first-rate score of A in our short-term care category. Our short-term care grade is typically employed to measure a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to offer higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last measure we looked at in this area is the number of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that 5.8 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. In calculating a facility's nursing grade, we consider the amount of time nurses spend with residents as well as the skill levels of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The last category we assessed is long-term care, in which this nursing home received a grade of B-. Even though this turned out to be its least impressive category score, this is nevertheless not a major area of concern. For prospective patients looking for a permanent residence rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 95.959595 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is better than most nursing homes. This facility also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.