Life Care Center of Vista

While we were not high on this nursing home overall, we awarded it a B- for our inspections rating. This score is more respectable than this place's overall grade. We would argue that one of the most critical factors in evaluating an inspection report is deficiencies. We especially focus on the severity of the deficiencies. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Lastly, this nursing home was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. This is generally a really bad sign. We would never recommend this facility.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an B-. Our nursing rating analyzes the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of skill of those nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. This nursing home averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures. Although this facility got dinged a bit for nursing hours per resident, it excelled in some of these quality-based measures. With fewer than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it fared very well in this statistic. This can be an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a policy of moving residents at least once a day.

This facility's next best category turned out to be its short-term care score, where it was awarded a grade of B-. With our short-term care score, we endeavor to craft a meaningful barometer for rehabilitation. In doing so, we assess the nursing home's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. In this nursing home's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than a typical facility. The last measure we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who eventually returned home from the facility. We found that just 6.1 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Our last area is long-term care, where we awarded this nursing home a B- in this category. Our long-term care grade is typically used to assess a facility's performance as a traditional convalescent home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services provided by a skilled nursing facility. After considering the amount of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination records. We were pleased to find that this nursing home vaccinates 98.54651 percent of its patients against pneumonia. This nursing home keeps its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.