Meridian Care Monte Vista

Although we did not rate this facility highly overall, we want to point out its nearly flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A- in this category. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. It is typically best to avoid facilities that had a long list of severe deficiencies. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

Unfortunately, this nursing home's next highest score is short-term care. Nevertheless, with a grade of D in this category, it still performed somewhat badly. Our short-term care grade is typically employed to gauge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To offer highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to feature better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Considering its score in this area, we were not surprised to discover that this nursing home was well below average in terms of its number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its residents based on the figures we looked at. The last metric we considered in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics doomed this facility's short-term care score.

As it turns out, this nursing home only earned a D for its long-term care score, which is well below average in this category. If you are looking for anything other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care ratings. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 95.67901 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Sadly, some of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.

The final area we looked at is nursing, which was this facility's worst area. We awarded this nursing home a D in that category. We scrutinized the qualifications of nurses at the nursing home, as well as the number of hours the nurses spent with residents, in computing our grade in this area. This facility offered a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is well below average. In addition to receiving below average scores for nursing hours, this nursing home was less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of residents suffering pressure ulcers and found this nursing home was at roughly 1.5 times the national average in this metric.