Almond Vista Health Care

We gave this nursing home one of our better scores in short-term care, where it received an A-. This is notably better than the nursing home's overall grade, which was certainly not elite. Short-term care grades are often used to judge a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to have high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer higher levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. We weren't able to locate information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who ultimately returned home from this nursing home. We found that 6.3 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

Another one of this facility's more favorable category scores came in the category of long-term care. In that area, we awarded this facility a B. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents healthy. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

We also gave this nursing home a decent score in the category of nursing care, with a grade of B-. The nursing grade analyzes a handful of factors, but the paramount one is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place fared better in some of the quality measures we looked at. In fact, it scored well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

In the final category of inspections, this nursing home really did not fare well. Sadly, it received an F in this category. This dragged this facility's overall score down as we heavily weight this category. For facilities with poor inspection scores, you should focus on any severe deficiencies found on their inspection reports. This facility was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that indicate that they posed a risk to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility also received 3 substantiated complaints in recent years. This is yet another bad sign.