Pathways Memory Care at Villa Toscana

Although we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a grade of C for our nursing rating. The nursing rating considers numerous subcategories. The most important variable is the amount of time nurses spent with patients. With 4.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day, this place surpassed the national average. We also look at the skill levels of these nurses and apply more weight to hours worked by skilled nurses. Lastly, we also considered some quality-based measures. This facility performed well in some of the quality measures we looked at. By way of illustration, in terms of the number of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, this facility performed better than the national average. This is often an indicator that a place has quality controls in place. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided with better nursing care.

Remarkably, we gave this nursing home a C for its short-term care grade, which isn't too bad of a score. In computing our short-term care ratings, we look at a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This rating is considered to be a reliable assessment of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We found that this facility was below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. In fact, it offered fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. It is important to determine whether this is adversely impacting the quality of care. The last item we looked at in this area is the number of patients who eventually returned home from the facility. This place fared respectably with 48.2 percent of its residents returning home.

Moving on to the category of long-term care, this nursing home was given a grade of just D in this category. For prospective patients in need of a permanent residence rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. After considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. We were pleased to learn that this nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia. To our surprise, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than many nursing homes. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.

Turning our last area of inspections, this nursing home received an F here. We would advise paying close attention to any deficiencies on a facility's inspection reports when it receives this poor of an inspection score. We suggest you scrutinize the level of severity of those deficiencies. This particular facility was hit with a category G through L deficiency, which rank among the more severe deficiencies. This generally indicates that the deficiencies found by inspectors had the potential to create actual harm to residents. Finally, this facility also received 33 substantiated complaints in recent years. This is yet another bad sign.