Villa Maria Nursing Center

Villa Maria Nursing Center is a very-large non-profit facility in Miami, Florida. We awarded this facility an overall grade of B. A grade in this range requires respectable scores in most areas. Even in a city featuring 37 other nursing homes, this facility should be a respectable choice. Fortunately, this place didn't have any bad scores in any of the major categories. Additional information about these categories can be found below.

To pair with its favorable overall score, we gave this nursing home an A for our inspections rating. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these end up being quite insignificant. This place was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies to cause an immediate risk to resident safety or health. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

Among the reasons we rated this nursing home so well is that it received a strong long-term care score. In fact, long-term care turned out to be its second most favorable category score. In that category, we awarded this facility a score of A. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is often a deadly ailment for nursing home residents so we like it when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. The last datapoint we looked at is its hospitalization rate. We found that this facility had 2 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is close to average in this area.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. While this wasn't quite as good as some of its other category grades, this isn't a bad score either. The nursing rating is based on many factors. The most heavily weighted variable is the quantity of hours nurses spend with residents. This nursing home averages just 3.1 hours of nursing care per patient each day, which is not an impressive total. Although this facility ranked poorly in terms of the quantity of nursing care provided, it performed admirably in some of our quality measures. It was above average in two of the areas we look at, with good scores for minimizing its patients' pressure ulcers and major falls.

Moving on to the final area, this nursing home received a decent short-term care grade of C. In computing our short-term care grades, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our objective is to devise a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Fortunately, this nursing home offers both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities offer both. The final datapoint we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 41.2 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is actually below average.