Mira Vista Care Center

Although we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a grade of B- for our nursing rating. Our nursing rating focuses on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of licensure of those nurses and the quantity of hours spent with residents. This facility averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident daily, which is a very low figure. Finally, nursing scores also consider quality-based metrics, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this facility actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is generally a reliable indicator that a facility has quality controls in place. Some falls could be avoided if a nursing home supplies enough nurses to assist its patients.

We were also stunned to discover that this nursing home earned a solid short-term care rating in our assessment. We gave it a grade of B- in this area. In calculating our short-term care scores, we size up the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This area is generally a meaningful assessment of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In this nursing home's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than the typical facility. The hope is always that this does not adversely affect the quality of care. The final datapoint we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 5.7 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is actually below average.

Unfortunately, this facility didn't receive glowing inspections in recent years. We gave it a grade of just D for our inspections rating. Inspection grades factor in many items found on the facility's recent inspection reports. If you find too many deficiencies on the inspection reports, this is generally the worst sign. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to resident safety. This particular nursing home was hit with a category G through L deficiency, which are among the more severe categories of deficiencies. These categories indicate that the deficiencies uncovered by CMS had potential to create actual harm to residents. On top of having severe deficiencies, this facility was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. We would not recommend this facility under any circumstance.

Moving on to the final area, this facility really did not fare very well here either. With a bottom of the barrel grade of F in long-term care, this is just about as terrible as it gets. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 96.11651 percent of its residents. Surprisingly, this nursing home also fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.