Vineyard Court Nursing Center

This nursing home received a quality overall grade as described above, but we especially want to point out its nearly flawless government inspections in recent years. We gave them an A in this category. Our inspection ratings account for a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we consider is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category tend to have few severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This means CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among the reasons we rated this facility so well is that it received a favorable long-term care grade. Indeed, long-term care turned out to be its second most impressive category score. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of A. Facilities that excel in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. In calculating our nursing ratings, we factor in both staffing levels and the skill levels of those nurses. 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 nursing home 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 generally be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Turning to our final area, this facility was given a respectable short-term care rating. Even though this was not as strong as several of its other grades, this is still a middle of the pack score. In determining our short-term care grades, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The objective is to formulate a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of different facilities. It doesn't look like this facility submitted information on registered nurse or physical therapist staffing. The final metric we considered in this area is the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 4.5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.