Vista Del Mar Health & Rehabilitation

While this facility's overall grade was not bad, it really fared well in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our best scores. Our inspection ratings are tied to several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this area tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

This nursing home's short-term care score is one of its respectable grades. The facility was awarded a grade of B- in this category. In determining these short-term care scores, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to create a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its level of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its patients based on the measures we assessed. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 5.3 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well below average.

Unfortunately, this nursing home only earned a grade of D for its long-term care score, which is not a score to write home about. Facilities that receive this type of score in this category may not provide the type of consistent 24/7 care that some other nursing homes offer. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Frankly, we were a bit worried that this nursing home gave the vaccine to a relatively low 83.146065 percent of its residents. Surprisingly, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than many nursing homes. This is its best feature in this category.

Moving on to our last area, we gave this facility a D in the area of nursing. This was the nursing home's worst category grade. Our nursing rating weighs several factors. The most heavily weighted variable is the quantity of hours nurses spend with residents. This particular nursing home provided a meager 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This number is far below the national average. On top of being below average in nursing hours per resident, this facility also had poor scores in the quality-based metrics we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. We looked at the percentage of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and major falls. This nursing home was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in both of these metrics. This is a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These statistics helped pull down this nursing home's nursing grade significantly.