The Montevista at Coronado

Even though we did not give this facility a favorable overall score, we actually gave it a very strong score for short-term care, where it earned a B. This is better than many facilities in this area. To some degree, this propped up an otherwise abysmal profile. In the category of short-term care, we try to qualify measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We assess a facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Unfortunately, it does not appear that this facility submitted registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. The final statistic we assessed in this category is the number of residents who returned home from the facility. We found that 6.2 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Surprisingly, this nursing home actually received a good score in the area of inspections as well. We gave it a B for that category, which is one of our better scores. Few nursing homes that were this poor overall received multiple category grades of this caliber. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be quite minor. This facility received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that CMS did not deem any of these deficiencies to pose an immediate threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

Unfortunately, this facility only received a grade of D for its long-term care score, which is not a score to write home about. In a long-term care setting, the primary goal is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is better than the vast majority of nursing homes. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.

Moving on to our next area, this nursing home didn't perform well here either. Due to a rock bottom grade of F in nursing, this is just about as bad as it gets. Our nursing rating is primarily associated with a nursing home's nurse staffing. With only 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, this nursing home's nurse staffing levels were well below the national average. On top of being below average in nursing hours per resident, this place also had poor marks in the quality-based metrics we looked at in computing our nursing grades. We looked at the percentage of patients sustaining pressure ulcers and major falls. This nursing home was at about 1.5 times the national average in both of these data points. This is a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These metrics pulled down this facility's nursing rating quite a bit.