The Village Healthcare Center

The Village Healthcare Center is a small nursing home located in Hemet, California. It looks like this nursing home is one of the highest-graded nursing homes we looked at. In fact, it received our very best rating. We were so impressed with this nursing home that we ranked it in the top ten percent of all facilities in the nation. Finally, this appears to be a very consistent nursing home with consistently strong grades in all four of the major categories. More information about its category grades can be found below.

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ short-term care grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Short-term care grades are generally used to assess a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To have highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This nursing home provided more physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most facilities. This is what we like to find when assessing a nursing home in this category. The last statistic we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that it performed as well as just about any nursing home in California in this area with 73.3 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, at most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

Adding to its impressive category scores, this nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A. Not many nursing homes performed as well in this area. Our inspection ratings weigh several factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher scores in this area typically have very few of these severe deficiencies. This facility received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This indicates that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Turning the page to our third category, this nursing home was given a top-shelf long-term care score. In fact, we awarded it a score of A in this category. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. Once we finished looking at the amount of care provided by nurses, we then looked at the facility's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 96.34147 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly can be a deadly illness for nursing home residents so we like it when a facility does not take any chances. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The fourth area we assessed is nursing, where this nursing home received an A-. This finished off a very impressive profile. Few nursing homes earned an A- or better in every category. Nursing grades are based in large part on quality and quantity of nursing care. This facility boasts a really impressive 5.7 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, of which a significant portion was provided by registered nurses. This is one of the more highly trained levels of nurses. On top of looking at levels of nursing care, we also looked at a few quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these areas as good measures of the quality of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.