La Vida Serena Nursing and Rehabilitation

In addition to performing well in its overall grade, this nursing home performed at an even higher level in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this place had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

This nursing home received an impressive long-term care score as well. We gave it one of our higher scores in that category with a grade of B+. When facilities receive a grade in this range in long-term care it generally means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 98.854965 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly is often a deadly illness for nursing home residents so we like it when a facility doesn't leave this to chance. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of B-. While this didn't quite match its scores in some of the categories discussed above, this is still a decent score. Nursing scores are based in large part on quality and quantity of nursing care. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. It performed well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.

The final category we looked at is short-term care. We gave this facility a B- in that category. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to score a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this facility submitted information on registered nurse or physical therapist staffing. The last measure we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 5.1 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is below average.