The Villa at Blue Ridge

The main reason this nursing home received a decent overall grade is its excellent government inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our better grades in that area, with a grade of A. This is a much better score than the facility's overall grade, which was decent but certainly not elite. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection scores. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be quite insignificant. This facility was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of these deficiencies to cause an immediate risk to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Turning to an additional strength for this nursing home, we awarded it a first-rate long-term care score. In fact, we awarded this facility a score of A-. For prospective residents in need of a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. One of the statistics we considered after nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 44.715446 percent of its residents. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The third category we graded was short-term care. In this area, where we gave this facility an F, which was an extremely poor grade. Short-term care scores are meaningful for patients in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a broad scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. The last metric we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.9 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics doomed this facility's short-term care score.

Moving on to our final area, this facility did not perform very well. Due to a rock bottom grade of F in nursing, this was this nursing home's poorest category grade. We scrutinized the qualifications of nurses at the nursing home, as well as the quantity of time the nurses spent with residents, in calculating our score in this area. This facility averaged just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. To go along with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this facility also did not perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing scores. We looked at the percentage of residents experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This place had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average facility.