Vista Park Health and Rehabilitation

With an address in Douglas, Georgia, Vista Park Health and Rehabilitation is the sole option we were able to find in this city. Sporting an overall grade of B, this nursing home is a fine option. Based on our assessment, this facility is a good fit for most people. The best aspect of this facility's impressive report card is its inspection rating. Inspection grades are discussed in the next section

To pair with its favorable overall score, we gave this nursing home an A+ for our inspections rating. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Unfortunately, we were not able to track down deficiency counts for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home performed well in our long-term care category. As a result, we awarded it a score of A- for that category, which happens to be one of our most impressive scores. When facilities receive this type of grade in this category it is usually a good sign for patient care and indicates that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccinations. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 96 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a reliable method to minimize negative health outcomes for the aged 65 and up population. Lastly, we looked at its number of hospitalizations. Here we found that this facility had 3.33 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Although this admittedly wasn't as favorable as some of its other scores in this area, this number can be skewed for some nursing homes due to some of the preexisting medical conditions of patients.

This facility also was given a favorable short-term care score. In fact, we gave it an above average score of B in this area. In the category of short-term care, we try to assess indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We analyze a facility's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. We were extremely impressed to find that this facility offers its residents substantially more physical therapist hours than most other nursing homes. The final metric we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who eventually returned home from the facility. It fared better than most nursing homes in this area with 51 percent of its patients returning home. At most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

This nursing home's weakest area is nursing, which is the last area we analyzed. We gave it an F in this category. Even with a few excellent grades in other categories, this score is still a bit alarming so we wanted to draw your attention to it. The nursing rating assesses many subcategories, but the primary consideration is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility provided 3.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is below the national average. Unfortunately, this place also didn't fare as well as we had hoped in some of the quality measures we assessed in this category.