Villa Mesa Care Center

While this nursing home's overall grade was decent, it really excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our best scores. Our inspection scores are based on pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple of minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

This nursing home's long-term care rating ended up being one of its better features. The nursing home was awarded a B- in this category. Long-term care grades are commonly used to grade a facility's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services offered by a skilled nursing facility. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. This nursing home was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of C. We analyzed the licensure of nurses working for the nursing home, as well as the quantity of time the nurses were with residents, in computing our score in this area. This nursing home provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a relatively low total compared with most nursing homes. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics. While this facility got dinged a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in some of these quality measures. With less than five percent of its patients experiencing pressure ulcers, it fared very well in this area. This is typically a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving patients more often.

Moving on to the last area, this nursing home really did not perform well. With a poor grade of F in short-term care, this is this facility's weakest category grade. Our short-term care scores are likely most important for those needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes more skilled nursing services. This includes not only nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other types of therapy. With a grade this poor in this area, we were not surprised to discover this facility was below average in many staffing figures we looked at. The nursing home provided substantially fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most facilities. Finally, we looked at the number of patients that who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.1 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.