Prairie Vista Village

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Inspection scores are tied to datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This nursing home was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies to create an immediate risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to draw your attention to the fact that this facility excelled in our short-term care rating. We awarded them an impressive score of A+ in this area. Our short-term care scores are critical for residents in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates more highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a wide scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last measure we considered in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 6.7 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

This nursing home also performed well in the category of long-term care, where we awarded it a grade of A-. Not many facilities fared better in this area. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in this category it typically means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. After we finished looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is too frequently a dangerous health condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility does not leave this to chance. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Moving on to our final category, this nursing home was awarded a very strong nursing score. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- in that category, resulting in this facility receiving straight A's. Our nursing grade features several subcategories. The most heavily weighted one is the number of hours nurses spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures 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 place the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a policy of turning a resident more often.