AHC Vanco

While this facility's overall score was not a highlight, it did receive a very good score in the area of inspections. We gave it a B+ for that area, which is one of our better grades. Our inspection ratings are based on several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are a key thing to look for on these reports. Most importantly, you should avoid facilities with severe deficiencies linked to endangerment of patients. This facility was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered severe. This indicates that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies to cause an immediate risk to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

We awarded this facility a respectable grade in the area of nursing as well, with a grade of B-. Our nursing rating is largely associated with a facility's nurse staffing. This facility provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is a much lower figure than we were hoping for. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place surprisingly fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. It performed well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the number of hours of care offered.

Unfortunately, this facility's third best score was long-term care. However, with a grade of D in this category, it still performed relatively badly. Nursing homes that do not fare well in long-term care typically are not as well-staffed and are lagging in a few of the areas of routine medical care we looked at. After looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. We were a bit concerned this facility vaccinated 21.491226 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is quite a bit less than what we were hoping for. To our surprise, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home had less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This was its best feature in this category.

The last category we graded is short-term care, where this nursing home was given a bottom of the barrel grade in this area as well. It received an abysmal F in this area, which is obviously a major disappointment. In computing our short-term care grades, we look at the facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This category is frequently a useful measure of a nursing home's rehabilitation. Given its abysmal score in this area, we weren't shocked to learn that this facility offers substantially fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most nursing homes. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that just 3.7 percent of this facility's patients returned home.