Hillview Health Care Center

The primary reason this nursing home received a decent overall score is its impeccable government inspections in recent years. We gave it one of our better grades in that area, with a grade of A. This is a notably better grade than the facility's overall score, which was decent but not in the elite range. These inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

This nursing home received its next best category score in the category of short-term care. We gave this nursing home a B- in this area, which is an acceptable grade. In computing our short-term care ratings, we look at the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This grade is considered to be a solid measure of a facility's rehabilitation services. Unfortunately, it does not look like this nursing home provided information about its staffing of registered nurses or physical therapists. The last statistic we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients that ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

The next area we analyzed was long-term care, where this facility was given a C in this area. If you are seeking anything other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care scores. Once we assessed the volume of nursing care, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination data. We were pleased to learn that this facility vaccinates 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Finally, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Our next area is nursing, in which we awarded this nursing home a grade of C in this area. The nursing grade weighs a handful of components, however, the primary consideration is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, we also factored in a few quality-based metrics in this category. Although this facility didn't rank well in terms of nursing hours per resident, it performed much better in some of the quality measures we assessed. For example, in terms of the percentage of its residents experiencing pressure ulcers, this facility fared better than average. This is often an indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided with better nursing care.