Viera Health and Rehabilitation Center

On top of receiving a strong overall grade, this place also earned first-rate health inspections in recent years. We gave it one of our better grades in that category, with an A. Inspection ratings account for several factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher scores in this category generally have very few severe deficiencies. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

This facility truly excelled in the category of short-term care, where we awarded it a grade of A. Very few nursing homes performed better in this category. Our short-term care grade is generally used to gauge a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to offer highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of residents that ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 6.1 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This facility is also strong in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of B. It outperformed most nursing homes in this category. The nursing rating weighs several datapoints, most of which are associated with levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The last category we looked at is long-term care. In this category, we gave this nursing home a solid grade of B-. This actually turned out to be this facility's weakest category. Our long-term care grade is commonly used to measure a facility's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services offered by a rehabilitation facility. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Lastly, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.