Vista Hills Health Care Center

Although we did not rate this facility favorably overall, we want to draw your attention to its nearly flawless government inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection ratings. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some are relatively minor. This facility was assessed 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered severe. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies to pose an immediate threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

We also awarded this nursing home a favorable score in long-term care. This nursing home received a B in this category, which turns out to be one of our more favorable scores. When facilities receive a grade in this range in long-term care it typically means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. After looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

We gave this facility a grade of just D for our nursing rating. There are a host of criteria within this grade. Most of the datapoints relate to the quantity of nurse staffing. This particular facility offered just 2.8 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This statistic is well below average. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing scores. This nursing home performed well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these metrics to be indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next category we assessed was short-term care. This nursing home was given a bottom of the barrel grade of F in that area. Our short-term care grade is often employed to grade a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. With its score in this category, we weren't stunned to learn that this nursing home was well below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its patients based on the data we looked at. Frankly, this was about what we expected here. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents who ultimately were able to return home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 34.8 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.