College Vista Convalescent Hospital

While we did not rate this nursing home favorably overall, we want to point out its relatively favorable health inspections in recent years. We gave it a B+ in this area, which is much better than its overall grade. Our inspection scores are tied to pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important thing to look for on these inspections. You should especially avoid nursing homes with severe deficiencies linked to endangerment of patients. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. A few minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

The next highest category we gave this facility in any area came in the area of short-term care, where we awarded it a grade of C. In our short-term care assessment, we try to forge a meaningful measure for rehabilitation. In doing so, we look at the facility's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. This nursing home boosted its score in this category by offering more than 50% more physical therapy hours to its residents than the average facility. The last datapoint we assessed in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. This place was respectable in this metric with 47.8 percent of its residents returning home.

Turning to the category of long-term care, this facility was given a grade of just D in that area. For residents seeking a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is better than the majority of nursing homes. Finally, we looked at its number of hospitalizations. We found that this nursing home fared much worse with 3.94 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Sadly, this statistic is more than twice the national average.

Moving on to the last category, we gave this nursing home a D in our nursing category. This is the facility's least impressive category rating. When calculating a facility's nursing grade, we assess the quantity of hours nurses are caring for patients and the level of skill of the nurses. Quantity of nursing care does not appear to be the source of this facility's poor nursing grade. This facility provides 3.9 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is better than we expected. In computing our grades, we apply additional weight to hours performed by more highly skilled nurses such as registered nurses. Despite being above average in terms of nursing hours, this facility had abysmal scores in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing ratings. For starters, we looked at the percent of residents sustaining pressure ulcers. This nursing home was at more than double the national average in this statistic. This is quite alarming when you consider that many bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the facility's fate of receiving a very poor nursing grade.