Vista Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

In addition to earning a strong overall score, this facility fared even better in the area of inspections which is associated with the facility's recent government inspections. In fact, we gave it an A+ for this area, which is one of our best scores. These inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this place had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among the reasons we graded this nursing home so well is that it received a dominant long-term care score. Indeed, long-term care is its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a score of A. Facilities that do well in this category typically provide patients with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. After we finished looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 99.47644 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is often a life or death illness for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility doesn't leave this to chance. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of C. While this didn't quite match its scores in some of the categories discussed above, this is still a decent score. There are quite a few factors included in this grade. Many of the criteria are tied to the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This place provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics. While this place got dinged a bit for nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in a few of these quality metrics. With fewer than five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it did well in this metric. This is generally an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a policy of turning a patient more often.

This facility's weakest area was short-term care, which is the final category we assessed. In this category, we gave this facility a grade of D. In calculating our short-term care grades, we assess the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This area is considered to be a reliable assessment of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. In this nursing home's case, we found that it provides fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than the typical facility. The final measure we looked at in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics doomed this facility's short-term care score.