New Vista Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

While we didn't give this nursing home a good overall score, we did give it a strong grade in nursing, where it earned a grade of B. This is better than most nursing homes in this category. The nursing rating is based on quite a few subcategories, many of which are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility California in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a policy of turning a patient more often.

This facility's long-term care rating ended up being one of its higher scores. The facility received a B- in this area. Long-term care grades are used to gauge a nursing home's performance as a traditional convalescent home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services provided by a skilled nursing facility. On top of considering the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Fortunately, this nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is a very respectable percentage. This place was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The next category we graded was short-term care, where this facility was given a grade of B- in this category. In computing these short-term care grades, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to create a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. We found that this nursing home was below average in the two key staffing areas we focus on. In fact, it provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. It is important to determine whether this also correlates to a lower quality of care. The last metric we considered in this area is the number of residents that were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below average.

Turning to our final category of inspections, this facility received a grade that's as bad as it gets. We weight this category more heavily than our other categories. With facilities that received this poor of an inspection score, we would scrutinize any severe deficiencies on its inspection report. This facility had 10 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only favorable thing we found is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that indicate that they created a risk to resident safety or health. Finally, we also would like to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received significant government fines in recent years of more than $100,000. This usually indicates that a nursing home's bad performance spanned multiple years.