Villa Maria Healthcare Center

With an address in Santa Maria, California, Villa Maria Healthcare Center is one of four facilities in the city. This nursing home proved to be a respectable facility, with an overall grade of B-. You could certainly do worse than this place. This facility is better in some categories than others, but it didn't have any weak links in any of the four major categories. More information about these categories can be found below.

We awarded this facility an impressive grade of A in the area of short-term care. Short-term care scores are based on a nursing home's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a wide spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, not to mention other types of therapy. This nursing home boosted its score in this category by offering more physical therapy hours to its residents than the average facility. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from this facility. On top of excelling in the area of physical therapy, we found that it fared as well as just about any nursing home in the country in this area with 76.2 percent of its residents returning home.

Inspections is another area where this facility excelled. In fact, we gave this nursing home an A- for our inspections category. This grade is far more impressive than its overall score. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This means the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

This facility's next most favorable area ended up being long-term care. In that category, we gave this facility a grade of C. Our long-term care ratings are more critical for residents requiring more traditional services related to activities of daily living. One of the factors we considered after this facility's impressive nursing hours was vaccinations. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a proven method to minimize unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the elderly population. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Although it had 1.82 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, its risk adjusted statistic was better than most facilities since it had some more complex patients.

The final category we assessed is nursing. We awarded this nursing home a grade of C in that category. Our nursing score is based on quite a few subcategories, but the paramount consideration is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This particular nursing home provided 4.1 hours of nursing care per resident per day, which was among the higher totals we found. Lastly, our nursing grades also factor in quality measures, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this metric. Avoiding major falls is generally an accurate indicator that a place has quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.