Vi at Aventura

On top of receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home also received an A+ inspection score. This grade is based on the facility's recent government inspections. An A+ in this area is one of the best complements we can pay to a nursing home. Inspection scores weigh a host of factors found on a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we rely on is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with better scores in this area generally have few of these severe deficiencies. This nursing home received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that CMS didn't consider any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also gave this facility a grade of A+ for its short-term care grade. Our short-term care scores are considered to be more critical for folks needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing. This means not merely nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 6.8 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The third area we looked at is long-term care. This nursing home also was awarded an A+ long-term care grade, rendering it one of the few nursing homes to be given more than one A+ category grades. Nursing homes that do well in this category typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Moving on to our next category, this facility was awarded a strong nursing score. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in this category, giving this facility straight A's. Our nursing rating is based on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of skill of the nurses as well as the number of hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these areas as reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.